How To Prevent Burnout For Impact Entrepreneurs And Purpose-Led Leaders
To celebrate 400 episodes of Impact Boom, we decided to ask a diverse group of purpose-led leaders in the ‘business for good’ movement to share their top tips for preventing burnout and living a balanced life.
Being seven years into the Impact Boom journey, growing a globally-focussed enterprise and having had the fortune of working with thousands of entrepreneurs has certainly brought it’s share of high highs and low lows. If there is one constant, it’s that the journey is a rollercoaster of ups and downs. It requires passion, flexibility, persistence, grit, an ability to mitigate risk and problem solve, whilst dreaming up the ideas, bringing people on the journey and working damn hard.
So how might entrepreneurs and leaders find balance, sustain themselves and prevent burnout when the journey gets tough?
key themes which emerged from impact-led leaders included:
Developing Healthy Habits: Ensure you are making time for physical activity, healthy eating and sleep so you can nourish your mind, body and soul.
Creating a Support Network: Lean on those around you so you are not alone on your journey. A great support network helps you problem solve, and can provide a shoulder to cry on or just be there to listen.
Protecting Your Personal Time: As social entrepreneurship is often a time consuming pursuit fuelled by your passion, you can sometimes forget the importance of keeping time for yourself. Make sure you do this, trust your gut and know when to say no.
Looking Back and Seeing How Far You Have Come: Celebrate the wins (small and big). You will be amazed by the journey you have already had and the challenges you have persevered through.
eighteen leaders in social impact explain how they are preventing or dealing with burnout and provide inspiration on how to live a more balanced life, and in turn create more impact.
Highlights from the interviews (listen to the podcast for full details).
Ben Pecotich, Dynamic4
A key thing I've learned is because we love the work that we do, it's easy for it to become all consuming. We invest everything we have (sometimes more than we can afford to lose), and our identity can end up completely wrapped up in it. This can make it easy to lose perspective and balance. I find being mindful, meditating, celebrating wins as they actually happen, and a bunch of other happiness habits have been key to helping me keep my sense of perspective. I also encourage people to create a written wellbeing plan; writing down a bunch of the positive things to keep doing for our physical, mental, emotional, and financial health, as well as including time for play. Then, we also need a backup plan for when we find ourselves trending in an unhealthy direction. Even though we are working on serious things, it doesn't mean we need to be serious all of the time.
We need to make sure we carve out unstructured time for play and experimentation.
It's important we have fun while we solve problems that matter: so we can keep on doing it.
Sally Giblin, Be The Future
My advice comes from my context of being in mad pre-launch mode. My healthy habits advice is all about doing it light, for those times when it's a bit trickier to do the full healthy habits I normally hold onto.
My three tips are:
do some exercise, even if it's a lap around the block. Do something to get the endorphins flowing while being outside in nature.
Second, if you have no time to cook, make a green smoothie. Make sure you're getting in vegetables and protein. It's the quickest possible thing to do, but you can make it super healthy for your body and brain.
The third thing I'd say is…
make sure you're still spending some small windows of time with the people you love, even if it's five to ten minutes.
Try to be present in that moment and enjoy that time with those people that really light you up, and that you light up as well.
Dr. Yannick van Hierden, Impaktr
I did a PhD on wellbeing and found that…
people who maintain a healthy lifestyle and prevent burnout are people who have designed it that way. They have created solid routines and an environment which supports those routines. Routines and environment dictate wellbeing.
This means stacking several non-negotiable habits right after you wake up, before you have lunch, and before you go to bed. Furthermore, you must physically design your house, workspace, technology and social life so that they support healthy choices. Two specific routines which support a healthy lifestyle are meditation and martial arts. Both are incredibly powerful practices that go hand in hand and make people truly resilient. Consider creating a spot in your house where you can retreat, meditate and look after your mental health. Then, consider joining a martial arts academy to look after your physical health. If I could only pick two things, I would say meditate every day and train jiujitsu every other day. Then, you will be okay.
Steve Williams, Mind Flow Grow and CQ University
My advice for impact-led entrepreneurs and leaders around a healthy balanced lifestyle and preventing burnout is to develop a regular practice that creates insight into your own mind.
This is going to help us really understand we are not our thoughts. We're actually beyond that. We can learn how to not let our thoughts and emotions run away with us. This is absolutely vital in addressing stress and burnout for anybody, let alone impact-led entrepreneurs.
We can use tools such as mindfulness or meditation to do this, or, even deep exploration through something like yoga or Tai Chi. This will help us come back to the present moment and be totally present. It will give us a superpower; to not become stressed and burnt out.
Luke Terry, White box Enterprises
On maintaining a healthy and balanced lifestyle, I wish people had given me advice when I was younger. If I was talking to a younger Luke around maintaining a healthy and balanced lifestyle, I would say what I say a lot to other social entrepreneurs, which is…
stop worrying about the things you can't control. We tell ourselves all sorts of stories. Know you're doing everything you can to shift a dial, but if you can't do that, then that's okay. sometimes you're not going to always maintain the quality of work you did in the past.
I know for me constantly I'm thinking, “well I did this in the past, how do I do it bigger and better now?” It's okay if you don't. Moving forward on that, we need to be careful of the stories our mind is going to continue to tell us. You might think, “Oh, well you can do better and you can do this.” For me, it's been about how we live that, and it's easier said than done to survive and be able to manage the thoughts in our mind. Also, we need to be match fit. I constantly talk about how I can be a better partner, parent, and leader. What I've realised over the last couple of years is to do that I need to get match fit. This will probably mean doing less to do more. It means sleeping and eating properly, backing off the stimulants and exercising every day. I didn't do that for about 10 years, and for me it begins and ends with people. I need to be physically and mentally healthy, so that when I walk into a room, I can be present and listening properly. I can send out the right vibrations in the room to people that ultimately we want to continue working with.
It begins and ends with people, and I think one of my biggest learnings over the last few years has been things don't happen to you. They happen from you.
How you present in a room and how you listen all adds up.
Emma-Kate Rose, Food Connect Shed
Ah, burnout. Well, I'm going through an episode right now funnily enough. I have experienced it once before, about eight years ago.
My best advice to avoid burnout and maintain balance is to pace yourself. We sometimes think decisions need to be made now and we get addicted to urgency. We must learn good decisions get made with a calm mindset.
Practice mindfulness, develop good sleeping habits, eat healthily, get exercise, and talk to your friends and family. Don't exclude people from the journey you're taking, because they're the ones who can see what you're going through most objectively and can often help with a shoulder to cry on or objective and wise advice.
Torien De Jager, TechforGood Australia
With all the responsibilities of managing a new social enterprise and constantly wanting to support those in need across the social sector, burnout is something I deal with daily. It isn’t unusual to work a sixteen hour day and spend too many hours behind my desk, which I'm sure most other entrepreneurs can attest to. It's easy to forget to take a walk, take time out to eat, drink a coffee, or pick up the kids from school (which only happened once)! It's truly difficult to manage the so-called “life balance” when you put everybody else's needs ahead of your own.
So, how do I deal with burnout?
If you can't or won't look out for yourself, make sure you surround yourself with people that will. Family can help or if not, join a group.
I recently joined a group of people with similar issues. We went axe throwing last week! That is another burnout week I don't need to worry about. Take care and don't forget to keep breathing.
Milly Bannister, ALLKND
Youth mental health and burnout is something I speak about a lot and also experience personally.
My advice to impact-led entrepreneurs would be to connect with other founders, so you can speak about your experience which is extremely validating.
It also provides a little more context and ideas around what you can do to support yourself better, because you don't know what you don't know. It also encourages you to be accountable and stay accountable to each other.
Eric Wedepohl, Ascendent
My advice is firstly to be really clear on your purpose and to have trusted advisors to support you.
Work with them to find a focused, non fluffy, actionable strategy to build a financially sustainable business. Then put it into action by saying ‘no’ to everything else, so you can say ‘hell yes’ to the things that rarely matter.
Danielle Fryday, Co-Founder, HATCH: Taronga Accelerator Program.
In terms of maintaining a balanced lifestyle and preventing burnout, from a professional perspective I highly recommend finding your network of people.
Having people around you who you can connect and collaborate with who are doing similar work and taking on some similar challenges is so valuable. As they say, a problem shared is a problem halved.
From a personal perspective, my two tips are know and trust yourself and…
Understand your gut and follow it.
If it's telling you you need a break or need to mix things up, try to find an activity that can act as a distraction, whether it's meditation or something meditative for you. I've found Lego has been an amazing tool for me to let go, focus on one thing and zone out when I need a break.
Nicholas Marchesi, Orange Sky Laundry
My piece of advice for maintaining a balanced, healthy lifestyle would be to make sure you surround yourself with rock stars.
Whether it be your best friend, best friend who's your co-founder, a friend that uses your service (or is impacted by the service that you provide) or a new friend, the opportunity to connect, learn, and grow from people you are around is important. For me, I make sure with each and every one of those interactions, there's an opportunity to connect, learn, and grow. Make sure you take time to press pause and remind yourself of the massive impact you have on the world. Also make sure you look after yourself.
Sonia Brown-Diaz, Yoga On The Inside
My advice or the lessons I've learnt for entrepreneurs to maintain a healthy and balanced lifestyle and prevent burnout would be…
really surround yourself with like-minded individuals. Reach out to those who may have skills you don't. If you are into spreadsheets and things like that, that's great, but if you're not social media savvy, perhaps reach out to people who do have those skills, and don’t try to do everything yourself.
The other thing is consciously make time for self care, whether that's being out in nature or having a little rest when you need to.
Sarah Ripper, Impact Boom & Myoni
My tips include nourishing your whole being, mind, body, spirit, and being aware of the environments and people you surround yourself with. This includes what goes into and out of your mouth, as well as your information diet. Make time for and prioritise things that are fun and not work related to fill your cup.
When things are challenging, connect to the essence, fire in your belly, or reason why you initially started your project or collaboration. Simultaneously, hold lightly the way your project has to look so you can be open to expanded possibilities of what's available, as well as learn to strengthen the trust in your body's barometer of communication. This also means listening to your intuition, as well as the daily and monthly cycles your body experiences, so you can work with and optimise it.
Penny Harth, CSIRO
My advice is don’t be afraid to be fiercely protective of your time. You are the only one who truly cares about your time and you hold the power.
Don't be afraid to say no. If you're thinking it's a maybe, I often find that's my gut telling me it's actually a no. If you can't do something or you're not interested (maybe it's just not the right time), be honest and upfront with people from the beginning. Chances are they'll respect your honesty and be understanding. If not, I'd say they're possibly not the types of people you want to be doing business with anyway.
Zunilka Whitnall, UNICEF
The lesson I've learned is finding and connecting with your purpose can be a friend and a foe. It's a friend because it guides you towards your professional North Star, but it can also be a foe because your passion can blur the boundaries between work and personal time to maintain balance and energy. It's crucial to nurture experiences and connections with people we value, including ourselves. One powerful tool I’ve learned from the Marketing Academy is time budgeting. You have approximately 112 waking hours every week. Draw 12 boxes and allocate each one to all of your activities; work, commuting, exercise, household chores, quality time with loved ones, and watching TV do not count! You will get a clear picture of your energy and if your time aligns with what you truly value.
Remember finding your purpose is just the beginning. Balancing your energy and maintaining healthy boundaries is what allows you to make a lasting impact and live a fulfilling life.
Kristen Zupancic, Plot Twist Placemaking
As a solo entrepreneur, I've learned work boundaries are completely within my control and they are my responsibility to manage.
We've all been there when we start thinking about work outside of our work hours. When that happens, I just write down whatever thought I have and revisit it within my set work boundaries. In other words, that's a task for Monday. When working from home, I love taking a short walk before and after work hours as a supplemental morning commute to my at-home workspace. This is my way of separating my home and home office. I've noticed a drastic improvement of my work-life balance since setting these boundaries.
Nathaniel Diong, Future Minds Network
My biggest piece of advice is to pause and reflect on how far you've come.
As social entrepreneurs, we have big visions and missions to change the world. In this pursuit of creating more impact and helping people, it can feel disheartening, like we're no step closer than when we started. Taking that time to celebrate those little wins with people in our community, our family and friends is a way for us to realign with why we started in the first place and add fuel to our fires so they don't burn out.
Impact Boom remains committed to helping drive action around growth of the ‘business for good’ movement globally. Get in touch to discover how we can partner to design, develop and deliver capacity-building programs or turbocharge awareness via our media.
