140. How I plan my year to avoid burnout and maximise feeling great

If you felt burnout coming into the end of the year - this episode is for you. Don't make 2023 a repeat! I share three things I do at the start of the year (and throughout) to make sure I avoid feeling burnt out and I maximise feeling great - and getting lots done in the process.

Transcript

Hello Happy New Year, I hope you’ve had a beautiful week relaxing, spending time with the people you love and of course planning for the new year.

We can reset any day of the year, but there’s something that feels really fresh about the start of a new year.

And a great way to reset and refresh and bring into reality the life you want to live, is to come along to Manifest with your Voice.

In this workshop I’ll take you through the exact steps I use to manifest everything from business to relationship to health goals – and the key is to use your voice. It’s what you say, the way you say it and how voice can supercharge your manifestation.

If you’ve never intentionally manifested something, honestly give it a go, even if you’ve tried in the past and it hasn’t “worked” it doesn’t mean it didn’t work. You know the universe is always conspiring in our favour so it will bring us what we magnetise or better. And if you’ve never tried manifesting this workshop is such a great place to start because it’s easy to follow and you get to improve your speaking at the same time.

Ok category three, you are a pro manifester and you do the journaling and the meditation and the intention setting – do you do the vocalising? Manifest with your voice will add a potent layer to your manifestation practice, and I guarantee you’ll learn something you haven’t seen before, because there’s a lot of my original IP.

At this time of year, there is so much talk of burnout, exhaustion, desperate need to switch off, have a break – all that.

And Hell yess I am a fan of resting – Rest is productive, rest is essential. What I’m not a fan of, is getting burnt out in the first place. And I was there. When I was in newsrooms as a journalist, working long stressful days and also when I first started my business, you know I ran and ran and ran and feared stopping because what if no-one wants me as a speaking coach. Totally ridiculous, very common though. Everyone who is running and running and working and working to the point of burnout is driven by fear. Fear of loss of income, fear of what people will think, fear of losing control …. A good friend of mine said something the other day that has stuck with me. He said the opposite of TRUST is CONTROL. Woah. So if you feel the need to be in control of everything – hello past me – there’s something or someone you don’t trust and that is usually yourself. And I thought I’d mention this because needing to be in control is often a justification for never taking a break.

It's such a false promise, because the truth is we can only be in flow and creative when we are honouring the cycle of work, rest, ideation. This fits beautifully with the Doshas in Ayuveyda. We need to cycle through Pitta – producing, kapha – recharging, vata – planning – and it is the cycle that unlocks the magic and keeps us in balance. NOT remaining in pitta – work work work.

And as I said this was me, so a couple of years ago I made some changes and far out it has worked. I honestly can’t remember the last time I “needed” a holiday. So in this episode I wanted to share with you THREE things I do at the start of the year to make sure I avoid burnout and maximise productivity.

Number One – the first thing you put in your calendar – is BREAKS, HOLIDAYS, DOWNTIME – whatever you call it, it is the REST AND RECHARGE.

So I have a couple of weeks in France at the end of April, I have a short getaway to Tassie in June and I’ve booked a week in New Zealand in October.

I always double or triple stack my holidays because the last thing I want on my mind when I return from a break is, when am I going to get another one.

And then on a smaller scale, my Sundays are pretty much untouchable I never schedule anything. Generally Monday mornings are clear and so are Friday afternoons.

At the start of a week I’ll schedule my gym sessions – cycling, boxing, yoga, pilates.

SO my calendar is full of rest and relaxation. And this means that I can pull a couple of late nights and early mornings on the laptop if I need, I can go go go with 12 hours of private clients then fly interstate for corporate workshops then pump out a podcast. The “busyness” is done with joy because I always know there’s an END in sight, I know I have the breaks scheduled in. And this is how you get to the end of the year and feel fine.

Now you might think well if you have a business it’s easy to do that and I can’t just tell my boss I’m no longer working Fridays. Of course everyone has different demands, in many ways it’s easier to carve out rest time when you have an employer because even though I’m a big believer in great work ethic – not a fan of the quiet quitting to any of that – AND also don’t sell your soul to line someone else’s pockets. You are replaceable and boundary setting is possible whatever your situation. Biz owner, employee, parent, carer – if you say you can’t set aside any time to rest, that’s you choosing to be a martyr and never giving yourself the gift of rejuvenation – and working through that pattern, healing that trauma with a coach will change your life. And if you’re still feeling resistant with but my job, but my family, but my financial situation. You can change all that if you choose. It depends how much priority you put on feeling great in your life. I know that might sound harsh, but every day I work through this kind of thing with my clients and I work through similar things with my coaches too so you don’t need to make this shift alone.

Ok that’s number one – DOWNTIME in the calendar first.

Number two is THEMING or BATCHING.

And similar to how I make Sundays untouchable for example. I generally have Mondays as admin, Tuesdays as deep work and content creation – although I create content pretty much every day, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday Private Coaching and Fridays – me time, for courses, self-care that kinda thing.

That’s a general rule, there is so much changing, especially as I need to fit corporate workshops in and things change.

Having these themes and of course a good calendar system reduces the mental load, which means less energy thinking about what to do – hello procrastination – and more energy doing the things.

Ok the third thing I do – and this one’s a constant work in progress, it is becoming an expert on myself.

Everybody is different. I’m just sharing here what works for me, something else might work for you, and the most empowering thing is to be clear on what does work for you.

What time of day are you most productive?

What brings you joy? What reduces your stress? When certain emotions arise what do you to do to regulate?

There are so many books and podcasts giving advice, no one knows you more than you so trust yourself to be the expert on yourself.

One example for me is how I have a lot of different tasks on the go at once. Like I’ll have an email and lots of tabs and music playing and I’ll do a bit of a podcasts, a bit of an email check, and I used to think this was so bad. It’s distractification, I’m a bad person because I don’t focus on one thing at a time. Then I decided to stop beating myself about this and celebrate that I’m so agile and adaptable that I can have all these things on the go and now all the stress around it is gone, because it was stress I’d brought on based on other people telling me this was an ineffective method. And you still might think that. That’s cool. You do you and I’ll do me.

Being an expert on yourself also means becoming really in tune with your energy, it means noticing those really early warning signs that you need to rest and recharge. This might be triggering, but if you get so burnt out and it all catches up with you and your health suffers and you find yourself falling into a heap. THAT is a sign you don’t really know yourself. THAT or you’ve intentionally chosen to ignore the warning signs – and we know it’s the feather. The brick and the Mack Truck. The universe communicates with us. If we ignore the feather, we get the brick and if we ignore the brick we get the Truck. So the better you get at feeling the feather, the easier you’ll be able to get into flow. And this year I’ve had some big realisations around feminine energy, how much I was resisting this energy – and I will do an episode about this because it has been the biggest shift in my thinking and my feeling for 2022 and has taken my relationship to next level amazing.

If we go back to burnout, how good are you at knowing when you need a break. For me if I’m staring at a computer screen with no inspiration – sign. If I start getting distracted around my boyfriend or my mum – sign. It sounds so basic when I say it out loud – if I’m tired I sleep, if I’m restless, I exercise, if I’m feeling disconnected I self-pleasure. If I don’t feel like creating content, I don’t – and I feel great about it. This is work in progress I’m not by any means perfect at this. However I have noticed in hindsight how little I knew about myself. The more you know yourself the better you’ll feel, the more confidence you’ll have, the less you’ll compare yourself to others because you are the motherfucking expert on you. And that my friends  has gotta be the key takeaway from today – GET YOURSELF A METAPHORICAL PHD IN YOU.

And you can’t know yourself without knowing your voice. Where it comes from, how it vibrates, what it can do for you. And that’s what I’ll help you with in Manifest with your Voice. I’ll help you become an expert on your voice – and we go deeper in Speak from your Soul. And this is why so many of my clients say I came for the voice coaching and I got life coaching. Because they are inseparable. Know yourself, know your voice and become the powerful creatrix of your reality, the sovereign of your sound. Gotta love the alliteration on that.

Do this for yourself so you can experience energy all year round. You can ditch the narrative of it being ok to be exhausted and strained and in desperate need of a holiday and live full and energised all year round.

Wishing you the best New Year. I’ll be at home doing some planning and getting up at sunrise on new year’s day. There have been many a hung over new years’ day so I’m not interested in that anymore. Starting the new year with a headache and a random in your bed not my favourite flavour anymore. Whatever you’re doing for new year’s enjoy, and I will see you in Manifest with your Voice, Jan 10th, info is in the show notes.

Bring on 2023.