#041 Special Focus on Burnout | Shannon Royden-Turner

Shannon Royden-Turner, guest · [01:48]I mean, burnout is, you know, it's not just stress. It's, there's a kind of a, a grading that happens to somebody over time. You know, you can, we all live with the basic level of stress, which I have actually finally gotten rid of for myself. And then we get more chronic stress. It's more persistent and people start to have a, a greater sense of kind of frustration and helplessness. And then we get to burnout. And that's more where people actually just feel, you know, emotionally, physically, and mentally exhausted. And they start to kind of disengage from work and from life. So, so you can kind of be in a social situation, but you feel completely disconnected from everybody, even though, and isolated, even though you're with people, you know. And so that's more where you start to get quite severe fatigue, often feelings of inadequacy. You don't feel like you're actually performing in the way that you should, and you're constantly getting that feedback. And then you also start to get more physical symptoms, you know, a lot of tension, sleeping becomes more difficult. And then you move into the more chronic phases of that, and you get kind of habitual burnout, which is a much more chronic state of, burnout, where you just feel completely trapped in your situation, and, you know, things that you used to love doing, you just can't get yourself kind of in it anymore. And you start to numb down your feelings. And that's a critical piece where you just start to literally shut down, and then you start getting more health issues. And then finally you hit a crisis stage where it's just total shutdown, and that's more where you start to get severe anxiety, depression, and health complications. A lot of the autoimmune conditions come in at that point.

Shannon Royden-Turner, guest · [03:57]Yeah, you know, to simplify it, I've put it into three key things that you need to look for, and it's you become very scattered in your focus. You know, you can, you can know there's moments in your life and in your work where you are super razor focused, and you're just like on a mission, and you're in it, and you can do it, and you, you know, and then there's times where it just becomes completely scattered. So, so looking for where your focus is completely scattered, you kind of don't really know where you're supposed to be looking or what you're supposed to be working on. It just feels like, and no matter what you touch, it just feels like you're wheel spinning. And then the second one is just depleted energy. Basically, you have no internal source of energy anymore. And then the final one is, you know, that you withdraw connection, and that's from other people, but also from yourself, like you lose your sense of self. Who am I? Like, what am I actually doing? You know, you start asking those kind of questions. So those are really the three kind of core categories. So scattered focus, depleted energy, and withdrawn connection.

Shannon Royden-Turner, guest · [09:25]I mean, you've covered some of it, but I'll go a little bit more deeply into the, the kind of human behavior and the science of it, I guess. So often we think, you know, it's the workload, or it's the pressure on us, or it's our desire to be perfectionist, and there's an element of that, but that's not actually the thing that makes us burnout, right? One of the things, and why we scattered focus, and you said it perfectly, is we try to live up to other people, or what other people think we should be doing. And the truth is that every single individual has a unique purpose, mission, set of values, and priorities that they live their life by. And this happens regardless of whether they're conscious of it or not. So our unconscious decision-making will still drive towards our own personal purpose, whether we know it or not, because every single thing in our life, every decision we ever make is towards what's going to get us more benefits than drawbacks in what is most meaningful to us as an individual. So when we recognize that and understand it, we delegate differently, because then it's about trying to understand what each person's unique contribution is, and how do we match the challenges and the job tasks to that. So one of the causes of, we spoke about scattered focus, right? You're going to get a scattered focus when you're trying to live in other people's values rather than your own. That's the thing that's going to scatter you. So you're trying to please that one and please that one rather than being integral to what you are here to do, because that's the root of your highest level of performance.

Shannon Royden-Turner, guest · [15:41]So the reason that I focus on, I mean, is to, if you completely burnt out and you're on sabbatical, then a hundred percent it's, the first part of getting you back to work is really figuring out what your purpose is, what your values are, what your mission is in life. And if that job is actually aligned with what you would love to do most, then getting you back to work is your pathway of healing. Because as soon as we're doing what we love, we waken up the part of us that is wellness, right? That is performance. So the faster that somebody can be doing that, if you take that away from somebody, they will decay. Because when we, when we don't have purpose in our lives, we have disease, we have decay, we have, you know, we don't know what to do with ourselves. So the first step is really to determine, is this the pathway of your greatest mission in life? If it is, it's how do we get you back there as fast as possible and identify what of these root causes were playing out that had you collapse, and then deal with those. And often it's just, you know, like the one person who was completely, in chronic burnout and had a degenerative autoimmune condition. When we went in and looked, it was really just how tasks were being delegated from the, the director. And then there had been a whole lot of stresses that happened. His mother had dementia, he moved home, his wife's job, you know, got, lost. And so there were a whole lot of stresses that he was struggling to adapt to. So as soon as we could look at, you know, how do we delegate differently so that you can do what you love, because his, he loved his job, but he was just being pushed to do commercial business development when actually what he wanted to do and what he was really fricking amazing at was something completely different. And so as soon as we got all the directors to figure out what their individual mission was and align their job task with that, the whole organization literally doubled in revenue in a year.

Shannon Royden-Turner, guest · [26:15]Awesome. I've, I've had to dig through my entire life to try and figure out what, you know, all of the challenges are that happened to me and what's the reason, what was the purpose of all of those life events, because your life is the story of your purpose. Every trauma, every challenge that you've ever been through is something that is awakening in you a desire to make a difference. And so when I went back and looked at, you know, when I was ten, my father was killed in a car accident, and it was, because it was a car accident, it was obviously very sudden. And, it happened at Easter time. And at that beginning of the year, my older sister and my two younger brothers had all gone to boarding school. So we lived on a farm in Grayton, in the middle of nowhere. And literally one day we woke up and my mom and I, I was ten, my mom and I woke up and we were like on the farm on our own. And she's like, hello world, this is interesting. And it was a very complex operation because it was sugar, wattle, pine, gum, avos, oranges, nachis, and there were like eight hundred people living on the farm. And it was the two of us like, oh, hello. It had a huge impact on my mom and, and I watched her burn out. I watched her go into depression. And interestingly, I've done work with her over the last year, which has just been the most beautiful journey to help her make sense of her own life. And one of the things she said, cause she went into severe, depression and, and suicide. And it was so interesting because she said the reason that that happened was we got my uncle to come and live on the farm and we moved into town because everybody said it was too dangerous for us to be living there. And suddenly she had no purpose and she was like, well, what am I going to do? And that for her was like, I may as well not be living. So I guess that really woke in me two parts around how do we build leaders who are able to deal with that level of disruption. And be able to adapt to change without burning out, without going into depression, because the impact is huge. And I was bearing the impact. My little ten-year-old mind was like, the only way I'm out of here is if this woman keeps, basically keeps her shit together. Otherwise, I'm in trouble. And so, yeah, I guess that kind of awoke in me a, a massive drive to deal with leadership and to, you know, in high stakes environment, because the stakes were high, right? We had like 800 people that we had to feed every day.

Shannon Royden-Turner, guest · [29:36]And then two years ago was another major shift in, in my journey where, my husband literally over the period of a week lost all the, all the feeling in his arms and legs and couldn't get up a flight of stairs. But I mean, the weekend before he was riding his mountain bike. So it was like, boom, what just happened? And that really took us kind of through a whole massive journey, but he was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition that's, degenerative and doesn't have a cure. And I've been studying human behavior for 20 years, and I know that that's not true. I know that there are limitations to the medical understanding because of what I was saying earlier, because we don't understand consciousness. So any medical condition that has that involved Is, they don't know what the cause of it is, so they don't even try and deal with the cause. They can deal with the symptoms. Oh, you have no feeling in your legs and arms. We can deal with that. And so the cure for it was literally a lifetime of going into hospital every, two weeks and getting a drip. And probably would, I mean, would never be able to work at his career capacity, again. So he's a director in an, in architecture practice that's on a rapid growth mission. So I started working with him and, you know, the first thing was to get him back to work because I know that he absolutely loves his work. And so getting him back to work, dealing with the delegation, so, you know, I've been working in his organization for the last year, just restructuring all of the, the kind of, higher level stuff. So within one month, he was back at work. And then he started doing the, the more of the kind of rapid energy reset using the actuality methodology that I use. And literally within one month, he was back at work, back on his mountain bike, completely cured a year and a half later still, has had no symptoms. And this was something that was completely incurable.