Most Days Episode #3: Burnout, Part I

Burnout doesn’t always mean you need a new job. Sometimes it means you’ve lost the thread of why you’re working in the first place, and your days have drifted out of balance. I break burnout down into a simple framework I keep coming back to: paycheck, passion, and purpose. When one of those pillars gets weak, work starts to feel heavier than it should, even if nothing “big” changed on paper.

We start with paycheck, because money is real and pretending it doesn’t matter only adds stress. I share a specific gratitude practice that helps me reset fast, plus why being precise about what you earn and what it provides can change your mindset. We also talk about how your brain filters your reality, and why shifting focus away from “I don’t have enough” can start a noticeable snowball toward steadier motivation and better mental health at work.

Then we move into passion and flow state: what you’re actually good at, what energizes you, and what drains you. If you feel underutilized, I walk through how to approach your boss in a way that’s honest, practical, and tied to value, including a simple 80/20 idea for spending more time in your unique ability. Finally, we dig into purpose, especially customer connection. I share a story that reminded me how different work feels when you can actually see the humans you serve and how small doses of humanity can reduce employee burnout, even in repetitive roles or remote work.

If you’ve been burned out, are burned out right now, or have climbed your way back, I want to hear your story. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs it, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

Transcript

Burnout As A Modern Pandemic

Courtney 0:00

Welcome back to the Most Days Podcast. I'm Courtney, your host, and today we're going to talk about burnout. Now, I have to be honest, we're actually going to talk about burnout a lot on this show because it's something that I have recognized as important to our generation and to the workforce right now. And it's something I feel I've been there, and maybe I can learn something and teach as I go. I'm starting to find a lot more clarity around this topic. Um, and I'm starting to get slightly obsessed with it because I think it's a pandemic of sorts amongst our generation, and we can't let it continue, um, both from our personal the employees' side and then also from the employer's side. Um, I feel, you know, I feel burnout on the employee side. I'm an owner, um, but we all get it, right? We're we're all going to work for a paycheck. And so I felt it on that side, but I've also helped my employees through it. And I think I've stumbled upon some tips that might help as we go. So I've been trying to frame burnout, first of all, and I want to start there. And and to ask ourselves why we burnout, I think we have to ask ourselves, well, why do we work in the first place? Right. Um and I've drilled down to three things, and they just they all happen to start with P. I'm not trying to be cute, I promise, but paycheck, passion, purpose. So your paycheck, obviously, that's your money. And I think that sometimes we put too much emphasis on the money, and sometimes we don't put enough emphasis on the money. And I know that that might sound backwards, but I'll explain in a minute. Passion is hopefully you enjoy your work. It is something that you like to do. Um, and you feel fulfillment from doing it. You feel a passion for the type of work that you're doing. And then purpose, this is the one that I think is hit or miss whether or not people feel this, but you feel a connection to the reason that you're doing the work. You feel a connection to the customers, you feel a connection to the product that you're making, the service that you're providing, whatever it is you feel like what you're doing makes the world a better place in some way, shape, or form. In our companies, we say that our job is to make our customers' lives better every damn day. And so we look for ways to make our customers' lives better and we ask ourselves when we're making decisions, does this make our customers' lives better? And a lot of times we decide not to do something because it really doesn't affect our customer in a positive way or it's just neutral, but it's a time suck. So I've I think I've done a good job of shifting our culture at our companies towards a really customer-based mindset. And so when we have FaceTime with our customers, when we're on the phone with our customers, whether you're customer service or you're working at trade show or or you just meet a customer out in the wild, which is always fun, you feel, oh, this is my purpose. This is what I'm doing here. And I don't think everybody has that at their work. And because a lot of uh corporations, especially, aren't building that into their culture, but I don't think that means that you can't build it for yourself. So we're gonna dive into that.

Paycheck Gratitude That Rewires Focus

Courtney 3:05

The first thing I want to talk about is paycheck. So we go to work to get paid. Um, you know, that's the that's the biggest thing. And I've made some content and some videos about it's not your job's job to make you happy. It's your job's job to be there. You clock in, or you know, you know what I mean, and you get paid and you take that money home to your family. And that's the goal. And I think so. I think sometimes, sometimes we chase the money too hard. And there's definitely people that are trying to climb the ladder and chase the money so hard that they lose focus on the other important things in life. But I also think sometimes we're not grateful enough for the money. If you have a job that's average, and maybe it's boring sometimes, maybe it's hard sometimes, maybe you feel burned out right now, but you're bringing that money home to your family. I think we can put more emphasis on that paycheck and say, that's what I went to work for today. I went to work to put food on the table, and that's enough today. For me, practicing gratitude is life-changing. Anytime I feel like I'm in a rut or I'm feeling like I don't have enough or feeling like I can't get to the next step. Gratitude. Thank you to the customers. Here's here's the gratitude practice I do. I open, I literally open our um, we're all of our e-commerce companies are on Shopify. Sorry, my dog is kicking me. All of our e-commerce platforms are on Shopify. So I can literally look on my watch or my phone and see our daily sales. So I can pull up one of our companies and see the sales. And and there's days where I think, oh God, it's a slow day, you know. Oof, this we're not gonna make our gonna merge, we're not gonna make our numbers for the month or, you know, how it can be. So I've started a practice where I open it up and I say, thank you for the $10,560 that our customers have trusted us with so far today. Anytime of day it works, you can pick it up and it could show zero because there's times in the wee hours of the morning where maybe uh maybe there's no sales yet, right? Um, how can you still practice gratitude? I am grateful for the 3,000 people who visited our website this morning, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to earn their business. I think being specifically grateful can be very powerful. So you get your paycheck, and let's say it's for $1,800, $18, $2745, making up a number. Look at that amount and say, I am grateful for the $1,842.25 that I was able to earn during this pay period. I am grateful for the ability that that takes, that gives me to take food back to my family, to buy the things that that bring my family safety, not happiness, right? Uh safety. Uh, that's what money brings us, security and safety. Practicing this type of gratitude, there's a lot of science behind this. It's not just woo-woo, Courtney's being a hippie. There's science behind changing our mindset and shifting towards gratitude that can change our lives. And I was reading a study uh a couple days ago, or not a study, an article, I think, out of the Princeton, some Princeton journal. Our brain gets about 11 million inputs every second. So from our five senses is from what we see, hear, touch, smell. What's the fifth one? See, hear, touch, smell, taste. Ooh. Um so we we're inputting about 11 million at a time, and we only processing 50 at a time. So you're processing certain tastes, smells, sights, sounds, whatever, um, at any given time. That means that there's a lot of other inputs out there that we're ignoring. And so when we shift and focus our attention onto gratitude, onto the positive things that our job provides us, we are actually shaping our reality. We're not just showing gratitude. Like, and and I know some for some people, if you've never done this practice before, this could sound, like I said, hippy-dippy, whatever. But I am a business person and this does work for me. Shift your focus and you can literally shift your reality. It works for me. I would try it if I were you. Shift your focus away from I don't have enough, I don't like my job, onto I am grateful for the money that my job provides. And I promise you that within days, you will start to feel a more positive mindset. And it's a it snowballs, right? If you shift that one thing, that paycheck moment, looking at your bank account, if you shift that towards gratitude, you're gonna start shifting other things also. You're gonna start noticing other things. You're gonna notice when you spend money freely, when you go to the grocery store and you're not, you're not necessarily worried about your budget or or you have plenty in your budget to buy the food that you need, gratitude. When you start your car and you remember 10 years ago when you drove, you know, a piece of crap old car, gratitude. There is, we can build that into our everyday life and literally shift the way that we feel about our job, the way that we think about our job. I could talk for hours on that. And I probably will in the future. Um,

Passion And Your Unique Ability

Courtney 8:19

okay, so moving on from paycheck, we've got passion. And I think that this again is undervalued at times when you're feeling burned out. And and it's simply a matter of reminding yourself what it is about your job that you like. So the times that I've burned out, I have been bogged down by parts of my job that were not my passion, not the reason that I am where I am. Um, for me, that I mean, I like so much of my job. I'm trying to remember what it was. Um, you know, for me, a lot of times it comes down to like the nitty-gritty employee um accountability stuff. I get really burned out when I feel like I'm repeating myself too often, or when I feel like I can create a system and then that system doesn't get like followed the way that I thought that it should. Um, that definitely burns me out. I get, as much as I love spreadsheets and cash flow management and operation, that type of operations, it's not my, it's not my highest and best use of my talents. And so I I'll get into it, but it'll end up burning me out. And so my passion really, what I am good at is looking is problem solving. I need a problem to solve. And I will say I am the best one at our company at problem solving. And therefore, I should be spending my time doing that. And sometimes the problem is, you know, we need a new system for our trade-ins, and I'll help, I'll dig in really hard on that. Or sometimes the problem is, hey, we need to plan two years of product development, and I dig in on that. So problem solving is where I shine and what makes me happy. When I find myself in other things for too long, it'll lead to burnout. So I understand that I have to say this with all with a grain of salt because I am a business owner. I am my own boss, technically. Uh, I have partners, but they don't boss me around. Um and so I say that with this caveat that I realize I have more control over that than maybe you do if you're listening to this and and you don't own the business that you work for. But we can all work towards this. If you are in a role where you feel like the thing you're really good at is being underutilized and you're babysitting or you're putting out fires or you're just doing little, you know, minuscule tasks that don't make you happy, you have power to change that. And let me tell you, I I don't, I haven't worked in the corporate world since I worked for Marriott in college. So, you know, you have to, again, take this with a grain of salt. But I do have employees and I do know other business owners. And I will say that an employee who comes to me and says, Listen, I'm being bogged down by these things, and I really want to work on these things and focus on these things because that's where I can provide the most value to our company. A good boss is never gonna tell you no, right? They're always gonna say, Yes, yes, let's help. I will help you work towards that. And if if they're not the type to maybe be proactive about that, you can approach them. You know, we are we are the captains of our fate, right? We decide what who we talk to about what, how we present it to people. And I I would say if you went to your boss and said, I feel like I'm underutilized here and I really want to focus on this because I can, I believe that it benefits our organization in this matter manner, and they say no, and they say no, get back in your lane, then yeah, maybe look for a different job. I think a lot of times they're not gonna say no. They might help you problem solve, they might help you figure out what you can delegate, or they might help you decide that maybe this task doesn't need to be done once a week. Maybe it can be done once a month. Figuring out your unique ability and applying 80% of your time to your unique ability and 20% of your time to the minutiae will help prevent burnout. Being in flow state, being in and doing the job that you love, you know, I would assume a lot of you went to school for the job that you have. I I did, I guess. I I have a business degree. Um, there was a time in your life where you chose this. And if you can kind of remember that, it's kind of like if you've been married for 20 years and the spark has gone out and you go renew your vows or whatever, like, how can we remember the passion that we had? What connects you to the reason that you loved this in the beginning and just focus on that for a couple days? Probably no one will notice if you're not focusing on what you're supposed to be focusing on in this day and age. If you work from home and you're like, you know, for a day, I'm gonna focus on the one thing I love. I don't think anyone's gonna stop you. And if they do, yeah, maybe then it's time to find another job. Those are my thoughts on passion. Okay. So, and again, I could talk for hours about that. And if you like listening, I will. Actually, if you don't like listening, I'm probably still gonna make the podcast.

Purpose Through Customer Connection

Courtney 13:05

So uh purpose. This one is the hardest, I think, to do on your own as an employee, and the most important one for an organization to embody. How do we connect employees? How do we connect ourselves to the larger purpose of our company? For me, it's a lot easier. I work in an industry that's based on hobbies. So people love being there. We're making their customers' lives better because they want to buy our products because it helps them build the thing that they love. It helps them with their hobby. That's a lot easier than selling insurance. In my mind, I hate insurance companies. So I'll always use them as a bad example. That's a lot easier than accountants. Again, I don't hate accountants, I just like to make fun of them. But um, it's a lot easier for me to see our purpose and to remind our employees of purpose. But I do think it's possible for any organization, and I do think it's possible for any one person to find their own purpose. So I'll start from the personal level because I assume most of you listening are employees of some sort. I think there's two types of purpose there's purpose in and purpose out. So, purpose out of your organization is who your organization serves, whether that's, I mean, it's always a human. At the end of the road, it's always a human. And otherwise, you know, why does it exist? We don't serve the robots yet. I had an experience the other day trying to get in touch with a bank. And they really annoying thing that happened, and it ended up closing one of my checking accounts, and it was just a pain in the butt. And so I called in and I talked to people at a call center, and you could tell they just don't care. They're unhappy, they they're understaffed. I was on hold for a long time, then they couldn't get a hold of their manager, blah, blah, blah. I talked, I got switched around probably three or four times. Finally, someone says, you know, I can't help you. I don't know what to do. Call a local branch. And I was like, No, I'm not gonna call a branch. They're not gonna be able to help me. You know, that just seems so antiquated. I didn't even know we had a branch of that bank in our town. That's I've I've always done it online. And I'm like, there's not gonna be a branch. Sure enough, there's one link down the street from my office. So I call them. And guess what? The woman who answered the phone was incredibly personable, incredibly helpful, and solved my problem within 10, 15 minutes and had to do a follow-up and call me back an hour later as promised with the follow-up answers. And I it hit me that that woman sees her customers every day. The people at the call center never see their customers. And I think that can cause that animosity towards your customers, that just that burnout from customer service. So that kind of hit me as a as an important thing. That how do we keep our custom our employees and ourselves connected to the customers better? At the end of the day, no matter what you do, you serve humans. There's no, I can't think of an example where you don't. And it could be really far down the line and it could be detached from your company. You know, if you make a rubber part that goes into a larger product that then goes into a machine that then gets to a hospital, yeah, that's really hard for you making this rubber part or metal part, whatever it is, to connect to the people being served at the hospital by the product, by the end product. That's difficult. So you're gonna have to work harder. You're gonna have to figure out where what you're making and where it goes. Um, once you figure that out, I believe you can really think about that end user, really think through what that customer needs, why they're at the hospital, why they're buying the product that you're contributing to making. Put yourself in their shoes. You know, if you are making parts that end up in a machine in the hospital, that one's that one's a little easier. If you end up, if you're making parts for my dishwasher, you know, what's your purpose? I don't know. You know, you're gonna have to think real hard on that. But I think if I dig, if I think for longer than 10 seconds, I can come up with a story in my head of a dishwasher allowing a mother to spend more time with her kids. Done. I don't think you could stump me on this one. I think I could come up with a purpose for everything. And you can choose to say, that's stupid. And that's fine. I'm trying to help you not be burned out. And I think I know that this helps. Anytime I connect with my customers, it helps me fight burnout and it helps our employees fight burnout. We have uh employees that answer the phone full time, and that can definitely be lead to burnout. And I would say of all of our employees, the ones who are full-time customer service on the phones burnout the fastest. Um, you know, they tend to be more entry-level jobs and they tend to be difficult, right? You're solving problems all day long. And when I watch the ones that thrive, they're building personal relationships. They have customers who know them by their first name. I mean, we have some customers who like refuse to order online and so they call every month to place their order for our for our consumable products. And then I have customers at our other brands who call just because they they trust Chad or Bryce, you know, and they want to talk to that guy. That was that employee deciding that that's how they were gonna run their career. Yes, as a corporation, as the as the boss, I can um encourage that all I want, but I'm not on the phone with them developing personal relationships with our customers. I'm not on the phone with them telling them every move to make that they need to talk to them this way. They need to act like they're having a good time. They're genuinely a lot of times having a good time because they genuinely enjoy talking to our customers. That's not what I felt at the bank the other day. And like I said, it's easier in our industry, but I don't think it's impossible in other industries. And I think that the employee has a lot more control than they might feel.

Add Humanity To Everyday Work

Courtney 19:12

You can choose when the phone rings to enter that conversation with a better attitude. When I worked at Marriott, I remember I hated answering the phone because it was always this like the same questions. What times check in? And it just fell over and over and over. And so one of the Marriott, uh, I worked at a courtyard Marriott, and so it's like one of the lower end ones, but at the JW Marriott, they used to, I don't think they still do this, but they used to answer the phones and say, it's a beautiful day at the JW Marriott. This is so-and-so. How can I help you? And I knew that that I had a friend that had worked at a JW, so she had told me that's what they did. So I started answering the phone that way. And it would get an uh a reaction out of the customer on the other end that put them immediately in a better mood. I kind of got a giggle out of it. I mean, try answering the phone. Hey, it's a beautiful day at the Flagstaff Courtyard. This is Courtney. Like you can't help but smile. It changed the way I the way I talk to my customers. And I remember I wasn't supposed to do it. Like it wasn't like corporate policy to do that. And I I know my boss would like correct me when he heard it. That's not how we answer the phone here. Well, too bad. And so I'm gonna answer the phone here. Um, and I didn't get fired, so I don't know. But I think there's ways you can work in humanity. You just we crave humans. No matter how introverted you are or antisocial you tell yourself you are, you still crave humanity. And if you're detached from it, if you're in a job where you never see people and you maybe you only talk to angry customers, it's gonna be really hard. It's why I made a video about how I think work from home is having an effect on our burnout. And I I really do believe that less time face to face with other humans who are in it with you, who are battling it with you, I think is causing some burnout. We can I'll do another episode about how to how to fight that if you do work from home. But I think that's that's the introduction I wanted to make about burnout.

Three Ps Recap And Invitation

Courtney 21:05

I've drilled it down to paycheck person per let's try that again. I've drilled it down to paycheck, purpose, and passion. Uh, and purpose being the one that I think we need the most help with. Although our relationship with money is really important, and our relationship with what puts us in flow state is really important. So I think they're all three very important. I'm gonna dig into each of these more. I would love to hear your feedback. I would love to hear your questions about burnout or hear your experience. Please, if you are burned out or you've been burned out and come back from it, I would love to talk to you. Um, you can find me on Instagram, you can comment here. I would love for you to follow the podcast. Thank you for being here.