Sam Vander Wielen: Hey, there and welcome to On Your Terms. I’m your host, Sam Vander Wielen. I’m an attorney turned entrepreneur who helps online coaches and service providers legally protect and grow their online businesses. So, I am so excited this week to talk with you about some practical tips in reducing your risk of business burnout because nobody wants to be burnt out. I notice that we tend to be so hot and cold, black and white, with things in online business where you go so hard, you try posting all the time, you try showing up all the time. And then all of a sudden, you feel like you can’t show up at all. And it’s so one or the other. Or maybe you’re like me and you really feel like, sure, you have this extroverted side, you can be outward, you can be friendly, and you also want to be like quiet and chill and inward sometimes, right?

Is that possible in online business? How do you balance these things? How do you find this balance without getting burnt out? That’s what I talk about in today’s episode. So, before we hop into the episode, I just want to read you the review of the week from CHF777 who said, “How is this information free? Sam is a natural teacher and a brilliant role model for heart-centered entrepreneurs looking to up their game. I’m going to have to stop listening while cooking so I can take notes.” I love it. Thank you so much for that review of my show On Your Terms.

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All right. With that, let’s hop in to this week’s episode. So, I’m so excited to chat with you about this today because I feel like so often people make assumptions about people in online business, especially when people get like a larger audience or they get further along and they’re like, “Oh, they must be able to be on video all the time because they love it, or they must be able to be on all the time because they’re an extrovert. But I’m an introvert and so like I am so different than them.”

And that was something that I definitely thought when I was building my business and I was like, is it just me? Am I the only person that can’t be like on all the time? Am I the only person who doesn’t want to be attached to my phone? Or am I the only person that sometimes after like going to a big event, needs like a lone time or even frankly, just hanging out with one or two other people? I just have this balance within me that’s both extroverted and introverted. And I used to make the assumption, like I see other people make the assumption now about me, that if somebody is really like extra in their business and they’re out there and they’re hustling, that they’re like super extroverted and that they can only do it because of that. When maybe they are, maybe that’s true, but maybe also they’re not, right. They’re more like me and they have both of these sides. And maybe you are, too.

And this episode was actually inspired by me talking about this one day on Instagram stories. And then a bunch of people reached out and were like, “That’s how I feel too.” Like, I feel like, yeah, sure, I’m friendly and I like talking to people and I can slide right into, throw me into any dinner party or any gathering, I’m super comfortable. And then after I leave there, I need downtime, alone time, quiet time, or just to unplug. I need both, right. And so maybe you’re like that too. I’d be so curious if you let me know after you’re listening to this episode.

But it’s not just about the assumptions that we make and what effect that has on our mindset in terms of assuming that other people can achieve things because they’re different than us or something like that. But it also is really important. And the reason I want to have this conversation today is that if you don’t balance this introvert and extrovert part of yourself, you’ll get seriously burnt out.

Because if your natural tendency, if your equilibrium is both this outward, like sure, I can hang and also, I need to be by myself and you only do one or the other, then you’re going to be out of balance, right? And I feel like I learned this along the way. I’m learning this now and I’ve put things in place in my own business and just like kind of figured out how to navigate this, being both an introvert and extrovert. So, I want to just have a little coffee talk today and talk about this.

So apparently this is officially called being an ambivert, which I did not know. I just always said I’m introvert and extrovert, but it’s called being an ambivert. And one of the things that I think is really important is just to identify this in yourself and say, yeah, like I do enjoy being around other people and I enjoy being alone and there’s nothing wrong with either. There’s also nothing wrong if you’re mostly one or the other, right. There’s nothing wrong with it.

But I think a part of this for me was just starting to get to know myself to the point where I was like, yeah, after I go to conferences, I need to have a week of what I call it cave writing. I’ll do more copywriting and internal stuff. I don’t want a ton of meetings on my calendar. I don’t want to do a lot of live stuff or whatever. It’s like I’ve learned now, okay, I have these parts of myself, so I know ahead of time that I’ve got to balance it. I think especially with when this episode is going to air, we’re going to be talking a lot about planning for the year and looking forward and seeing what you’re doing for next year, but also reflecting back on what you did this year.

I think that this introvert extrovert thing is part of the conversation because as part of that, you have to do a little bit of an energy assessment. So, I think it’s important, just like it’s important to kind of accept and identify that you have both of these parts, and both of these parts are completely valid and need nourishment. It’s also really important to say maybe what fills you up, for example, and what gives you energy is not the same thing as what gives me energy and vice versa. Maybe what takes energy away from you is not the same thing as for me, and that’s completely okay as well. But what’s really important is that you get clear and do a little bit of an energy assessment when you look at different areas of your business, tasks of your business, the kind of have to’s, the things that you have to do as a business owner.

What are those things that are just draining the life out of you? What are those things that make you feel like you’re filling yourself back up, right? So, like for me, for example, doing these podcasts and recording these episodes, I feel so excited to do them. They fill me up, they fill me with energy, they make me feel really good. At the very least, they don’t feel like a drain. You know that stuff does not feel like a drain. I’m trying to think actually of what does feel like a drain for me on the business.

I mean, probably for me, the mental load of like kind of, as a business owner, we walk around, we think about our businesses all the time and my business is like my baby. And so, it is the thing that’s always in the back of my mind, like, did it eat, did it sleep? Does it need to be fed? Does it need to go potty? Like that’s always in the back of my mind for my business. So that’s probably what “drains” me the most. It was like that mental load or that worry, that constant thinking about it, not being able to shut it off. And that was something when I was doing my energy assessment that not only when I got to the point that I could swing hiring people and especially hiring full-time employees, that was really important to me.

But once you actually get employees in the door, you don’t just say like best of luck, let me know how things are going. There’s going to be a lot of interaction with them. There are a lot of training and working, collaboration together, right? And I’ve noticed, like for me, I have to be really clear with them and I have to communicate with them that, “Hey, these things are what it’s like stressing me out. It would be so helpful to me if somebody could take this.” Or if there’s one task or something that I am responsible for but there’s one little nugget in there that is getting kind of in my way, and that’s making that task a little more difficult, I can communicate to the team, say, “Hey, is there any way that we could have somebody on the team take care of this so that when I go to record podcast episodes, this stuff is all ready?” Or something like that, something that does make it easier.

Now, of course, that’s what I do now, right, when I have people. When I didn’t have people, it was more like having a plan as to where things were headed. So, a couple of years ago this would have looked more like, okay, these tasks drain me. I know I don’t want to do them forever. How can I start to delegate them and offload them to someone else, whether that’s now, six months from now, a year from now, right. So, you can at least start to put it into place. I think even just identifying that those are things that drain you is half of the battle. And then we can work on starting to offload those when that becomes available to you.

I also like to see what doesn’t even feel like work to you. What do you look forward to doing? Like I always tell Lindsey, my operations manager, I get so excited when she tells me that it’s a week of recording podcast episodes. I really look forward to it. I get really excited when I have time to just write, when I’m going to rewriting you, all the emails that I write you twice a week, when I’m writing like captions or something, when I’m working on my book proposal, any kind of writing that just I look forward to it.

And again, then I know, okay, I’m going to schedule those things into my calendar when I’m going to go through something that I know is also a little bit more energy draining, right? So it would be interesting for you after you do this energy assessment to look at your calendar, especially as you’re planning out 2023, hopefully. Does your calendar reflect the kind of energy assessment that you’ve now identified for yourself? Or when you look at your calendar, for example, is it full of a whole bunch of stuff that just drains your energy?

Now, there’s this like whole other part of me as we have this conversation that always feels silly having this conversation without contextualizing it, without mentioning things like privilege, right? Because I’m like, boy, what a privileged life and what a privilege business to be able to sit here and be like that drains my energy and like, I don’t want to do it, right. So, at the same time as I’m saying this, it also feels very unrealistic to me. And I’m just being honest about that kind of like that kind of internal struggle that I have when it comes to this. I also am a big believer in not like or at least I feel like right now I’m really working on finding the curves and the edges and things, not being so harsh, black and white on everything, right? And so maybe it’s not a matter of like a privileged position versus the super woo position of manifest your dream day and your dream calendar. Maybe there’s something in the middle, like stuff has to get done. Trust me, I have a lot to get done. There’s a lot of “have to do” in terms of running my business. And then, yes, there are also places where I have some input and some flexibility, and I can play with it.

So, I don’t think it has to be so extreme, but I just wanted to mention that because whenever I hear these conversations, I’m a little like not everybody gets toto do this, right. And I also am very honest about the fact that when I was building my business in the beginning, well, first of all, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. I was just like everyday hustling and trying to build the business. And I didn’t have a whole lot of intention. So please, like, release that from you that you’re supposed to have this all perfectly worked out right now.

But in the beginning, for the first several years of the business, it was much more imbalanced in terms of probably I was doing many, many more tasks that “drained” me because you have to do everything in the beginning for probably a while. I just think it’s nice to start identifying this and move in that direction eventually. And that’s kind of the goal hopefully with the business. That’s really how you’re going to be able to accelerate or how you’re going to be able to scale if you want to scale.

So, I would also encourage you to think about whether or not you’re being intentional about truly closing out of everything during downtimes. So, one of the things that I see often in business burnout with people is that they will take time off, but then during the time off, they’re still on essentially. And the kinds of businesses that we have, that’s just so easy. Like you think you’re on social media, you think you’re just posting stuff for fun, then you see a DM from something, then that leads you to your email, which leads you to your Facebook group. Like it’s just a very slippery slope. And the line between being like a personal brand and a business brand are very, very blurry. And I just think it’s very easy.

So, like I’ve noticed a lot, especially over the past year and especially when my dad was sick and after my dad passed away this summer, during my couch time, when I would be at night or go to take a break or something and I would just be kind of vegging out or thinking I was vegging out, I was sitting there on my phone like doomscrolling. And maybe my intention was originally to watch like food videos and stuff like that, what I would typically want to watch on Instagram. But while I’m doing that, I automatically come across competitor stuff or people copying me or people DMing me to tell me that people are copying me or people DMing me legal questions or whatever.

And it’s just one thing would lead to another. And there I go down some spiral thinking like, I’m never going to be anything, my business doesn’t matter, and all that kind of stuff. Like, no wonder I didn’t feel recharged, right. I wasn’t actually being intentional about closing out during my downtime. I wasn’t going down during downtime.

The other thing that you can do is you’re going into 2023 especially, is that you can plan for rest periods before, during, and after times of push. So, I talk a lot about like push times, like go, go, go times. And I don’t believe in making these high peaks and valleys in your business. I kind of like them more as like hills and valleys. And so, I’m not saying when I say rest, I’m not saying like you’re off. Unless if you can do that, that’s awesome.

But if you’re like me and you still need to do something in your business and you need an income, then what I at least do is like before a promo and like after a promo, I usually give myself a little bit of buffer where I’m not doing some of those tasks that are the more draining ones that I was talking about for me. So maybe I’m not doing tons of interviews, tons of reels, tons of outward stuff. Maybe I’m just writing in my little cave and I’m doing that kind of stuff. Or maybe I batch enough ahead of time so that I give myself some downtime.

You have to give yourself grace that every season is not going to be a go, go, go one. And so, if you go into every corner, every promo, every whatever is thinking like you’re going to operate at the same level. I just don’t think that’s realistic and you’re kind of setting yourself up for failure. I feel like that would be like going to the gym seven days straight and expecting your performance to be at peak or even get better for every single day. Like you need downtime, you need rest, you need to do other workouts, you’ve got to mix it up, you got to unplug, you’ve got to rehabilitate, you’ve got to ice, heat, all the things.

It’s the same thing with your business, right? We can’t be go, go, go at our peak. So, that’s why instead of you pushing really hard for four months and then burning yourself out so badly that you have to take six months off, why don’t we just not make the highs as high and the lows as low? I think this every single time that I see somebody announce their break from social media. I see this all the time on Instagram. People are like announcement, I am leaving Instagram for good or for six months or they come up with something, right? Totally fine, if that’s what you want to do.

But you know what I see as a pattern very often, people announce these big break ups with social media and then they come back usually very quickly or at the very least, much sooner than what they said, that the amount of time, if they gave one. I always think to myself that, well, first of all, like the power of the addiction of social media is real. I’m addicted to social media. I’m not casting any judgment because I’m right there. I’m so addicted to it that I can’t leave, right? I mean I can, but I’m choosing not to.

And what I always think, though, is that it’s like always serves as a reminder to me that I don’t want to spend so much time there. It gets so burnt out there that I have to leave for six months or that I have to announce that I’m taking a month off or something like that. So, if I don’t go as high, then my lows don’t have to be as low, right? It’s a little bit more of like this balanced in between. I don’t need to be there constantly. I don’t need to share everything. I don’t need to teach everything that I know, as I talked about in a previous episode, I’ll link that down below. But I think just working on this balance and this is part of this like introvert extrovert thing because like social media, for example, is very extroverted. It’s a lot. It takes energy from you in a different way. And then to get like that amount of feedback and everything takes energy from you in a very unique way.

So, I think this is a very good place where that that kind of balance is super important. We can’t always lean in to rest, I understand that. And we wouldn’t have a very good business if we always lean into rest. So, I understand we have to balance it but that’s also why I believe in not going so hard, then you have to take off for so long. I also think that one way that you can kind of manage your energy in this department is to hold on to pieces of your life, hobbies, maybe your family, I don’t know, some part of your life, some part of your day to day, just for yourself, right? Maybe it’s something that your Instagram followers, your whoever followers wouldn’t even know that that’s something you’re into because you don’t really talk about it.

I do think it’s helpful from a personal standpoint to share one or two of those things, maybe one hobby. Like this summer I started playing tennis and started from scratch and I kind of shared that along the way. Did I share every single moment? No. I took two lessons a week. I probably shared once a week. I was playing multiple other times a week. I think I would work it into stories like once a week or something like that. But there are also things I do in my day-to-day life that I just don’t share at all. I also think it’s kind of cool. Like somebody encouraged me one time to like, go get a hobby and not to share it. Like, go and don’t take a picture of it. Don’t take a video of it. Don’t even have your phone. Go take a pottery class, don’t share it. Go to dinner, don’t take a picture of it.

So, holding on to these pieces of our life, first of all, can start to build in some of this balance to our day-to-day. It also gets us out of the habit of sharing every single thing that we do every single day, which we don’t need to do to be successful. And it can just allow us to start getting comfortable and a little bit more used to just leaving the devices behind and whatever. Like I, for example, whenever I walk, I don’t bring my phone. And so, just like I look forward to this time every day that I know I just can’t be reached, and I like it. Obviously, I know that that’s not available to everyone. When my dad was sick, I couldn’t go without my phone. I understand if you have little ones. There are many different scenarios in which you can’t always do that but just take that advice and you can apply it to somewhere else in your life. Maybe it’s just putting your phone on airplane mode for a little while, while you do some work or something like that.

Now, this year, I at the beginning of 2022, I declared my health a big priority and I was like, this is the year of wellness. And I came up with this whole vision of what that meant to me. And it wasn’t weight loss, but it wasn’t this and it wasn’t that, but it was this and it was that. And I started treating myself more like an athlete. I have an athlete background. I played volleyball. That was like my entire life up until law school. And so I’m very used to that concept that being an athlete is 24/7. It’s not just the time that you spend on the court. It was everything that I did outside of that led to it, too. And as you can imagine, I took volleyball very, very seriously and I took my body and everything around it very seriously. And so, I’m used to it.

And now I’m a little older, a little wiser to know I don’t have to go so, so crazy. But this year, I mean, I started with the basics. I started properly hydrating. I started eating enough because, like, I wasn’t eating regularly. I’m not hungry when I first wake up. So, a lot of times I would just like skip breakfast and then I’d be ravenously hungry, but like 11, 12. So I started doing that. I started balancing my meals more. I’m not going to get into specifics because I don’t even want to open that can of worms. But don’t worry, I worked with professionals. I followed all these things, but I wanted to have more balanced meals. I even, like, tracked my blood sugar for a while. I wore a CGM that was pretty cool. So, I did all this stuff to treat myself more like an athlete this year.

I’ve been in therapy for a long time because my dad was sick for a long time. But I also committed to weekly therapy to process business issues, instead of processing them in real time on social media or even with friends in the industry. So, I think there can be this tendency when we start an online business, hopefully you meet a few people who have businesses that are similar to yours and sometimes we can just get in the habit of sharing with them. And I have a handful of very close friends who I’ll still do this with. But before, it was just a little too — it was like townhall. It was too much.

Now, if something happens in the business, if I’m like really pissed this person keeps copying me or this person keeps mimicking me like everything I do, or I have some fear coming up or some scarcity thing, I talk to my therapist about it. I think having your therapist to not only work through childhood issues and childhood trauma and anything else that’s coming up day-to-day, but I think talking to them about business issues has been really helpful for me because this person’s removed from the online business space. So, they kind of like they’re not you know, they don’t have like the shiny syndrome of like, oh, you can grow this business to be the 8 billion figures and all these things. They’re much more down to earth about it.

I also talked to Jen, my mindset coach, Jen Diaz, who I’ve had on the podcast before. I’ll link her episode below. Jen’s amazing. And Jen is a mindset and success expert. She’s incredible and I talk through stuff with her all the time. So, having a sounding board that’s outside of, I think like a friend or family member, if that’s available to you, that’s very helpful.

I also think that something that’s been very helpful to me this year has been protecting my morning. So, for me, mornings are important. Maybe for you, it’s nighttime or some other time. And maybe given your life circumstances, mornings don’t work for you. I don’t believe in the six-hour morning routine. I don’t think it’s realistic for most people. So, I think kind of like a workout thing. It’s like then people don’t stick to it because they think that it has to be like a 12-step morning routine.

But I know that for me, at least, like I even when I was by myself and I didn’t have anyone working for me, I protected my mornings. Like I didn’t schedule meetings before 10:00 AM and then unless I really had to. But I try to protect my mornings because I knew like I had to protect my own energy. I had to do what I needed to do. And that helped me to not build resentment in my own business. I didn’t resent the people I had meetings with or anything like that.

And you want to have a failsafe plan, right? So, if you feel yourself drifting too far one way or the other. So, if you feel yourself drifting too far to like I’m heading towards burnout because I’m doing all this extroverted stuff, I don’t have enough introverted stuff built into my schedule. I’m not protecting my time or my energy. I’m doing too many draining tasks and all that kind of stuff. What is a shortlist of some things that you can do or have on deck to self-correct?

So, one thing that I will do is like I will usually look through my calendar and I will prune, so I will cut things that I really can’t do right now. And if there are things that I can just reschedule for a little bit later or I can spread them out more, it’s something that I can also just get better at as I’m scheduling things. I don’t schedule like multiple outward events on one day, I just started to get better with pacing myself and spreading things out.

So, I’d encourage you to have a little bit of a failsafe plan, a list of things that you can do if you realize you’re drifting too far one way or the other. How can you self-correct? How can you come back to your balance, whatever your equilibrium is? And I would say like continuing to work on whatever is coming up for you. If you feel like you’ve got to be on social all the time, you’ve got to be present all the time, is it people pleasing that’s coming up for you? Is it a scarcity thing? Is it like some abandonment thing? It need to be liked. I need to be helpful. That’s like one that’s really big for me. I constantly feel like I have to be helpful. And if I’m not being helpful, then I’m not valuable. If I’m not valuable, then people will leave, right?

And so, I think it’s really important to kind of get to the root of why do you feel like you always need to be on or why do you feel like you always have to be on social? If that’s the thing that’s kind of getting in your way and keeping you drained, keeping you feel like you’re going towards burnout, right? So, I would encourage you to work with whoever you can or to continue to learn and expand in this area about what’s coming up for you.

Well, this has been fun to talk through with you. I hope that you liked it. If you did like this episode, please send me a DM on Instagram, @SamVanderWielen. I hope that you’ve already left a review for the show. If you listen on an Apple, please leave a quick review. If you listen on Spotify, please leave a quick rating. It is so helpful to us in keeping this podcast free and available to online entrepreneurs. I so appreciate you being here, and I can’t wait to chat with you next week. See you then.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to listen to podcast. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links and more at Samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps to Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at SamVanderwielen.com. And to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram, @SamVanderWielen and send me a DM to say hi.