You started out with high hopes. You knew it would be a tough journey, you knew life would be hectic. You knew it would be challenging. But it seems the vision you had in the first place, the one where this path led to joy and freedom and independence, has disappeared very quickly. Instead, you’re left feeling a shell of your former self, with way too much on your plate, wondering how it got so heavy and how you’re going to make it feel better again.
You’re not alone.
Everyone I coach, fits into this diagram somewhere. But I only just created this diagram, because I only just learned that from my clients. I’ve been busy helping people, one at a time and using my group programmes too, but I suddenly realised there were patterns forming. And that’s when I came up with the Burnout Triad.
You see everyone comes to me feeling some version of:
- Overwhelmed
- Overworked
- Overweight
But why?
Because I work with high achievers. Ambitious, busy people. People who RELISH a challenge. But for that very reason, the things that help them keep moving forward – tenacity, determination, ruthless focus – are the same things that tear them down. Because they can often be ruthless with themselves, they can be determined to help others and they are too tenacious to ask for help or know when to let something go.
So life gets busier and busier and the first thing you do is push your own needs to one side. You skimp on sleep, mealtimes, gym time, you time. In your head, “hopefully it’ll get easier when this little push is over”. But that “little push” never ends. It becomes the cliched daily grind and before you know it, you’re stuck on a treadmill with an ever increasing speed and you don’t know how to get off.
It’s time to get off.
Performance coaching is about solving the problems that come from any area of life when we push our own needs to the side. We neglect our health and it stifles out creativity, it sucks our focus out, we lose energy and gradually we become less and less able to focus on what it is we set out to do in the first place. And the vision begins to fade, because it seems impossible to reach.
The last thing people want to do is press stop or slow down the speed on that treadmill, and yet that’s the only way to solve the problem.
That burnout triad shows you exactly how things overlap and intensify. And so in order to get out of that, we’ve got some work to do…
If you want to know where to start, take the Super Human scorecard and see exactly what you need to start working on today to start improving things and getting off that treadmill.