Today’s episode of Creating The Path is about new year’s burnout, how to manage that initial excitement of working on new goals, and ultimately, avoid burnout before the first quarter is even over.
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Topics discussed in this episode:
[00:30] What’s New Year’s Burnout?
[01:34] How to manage the excitement so we don’t burnout in Q1
[03:57] Intentionally holding yourself back to avoid burnout
[06:17] An example on how to avoid new year’s burnout
[08:30] Keeping in mind the future view and year goals
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Noteworthy Quotes:
“It’s a super common phenomenon where people will set new year’s resolutions and then, by February, they’ve already given up on them.”
“Even though I know I have the energy to do it right now, I know that if I do too much I’ll burnout or lose my motivation.”
Summary of the Podcast:
Creating the Path is a podcast that challenges multi-passionate entrepreneurs to achieve their goals by working less and eliminating overwhelm, so they can create their own unique pathway to a life they love. My mission is to transform hustle culture and assist others to shift away from living life on auto-pilot to living intentionally and following your own path to a life you love instead.
Host Bio:
Heather Grace Hanson is a certified positive psychology-based coach and creator of the Intentional Energy Framework, a system that empowers you to create a life and business you love without burning out. Heather is obsessed with all things personal development, running and walking in the park, interior design, salsa dancing and most importantly, spending time with her pup, Barclay.
Episode Transcript:
All right. Let's talk about New Year's burnout and how to avoid it. So, I don't know if this is a real term or if I just made it up, but I think we all know the phenomenon right? You know it's a super common phenomenon where people will set New Year's resolutions and then by February they've already given up on them.
So I think what happens there is, we get we set these resolutions or goals or all these big plans for the new year, and we get really excited to work on them, and then so we go really big in January and then we're burned out on it by February, so we just give up when we haven't seen the results quick enough that we expected, and so we lose the motivation.
And so today I want to talk about how to avoid that because we've already talked, you know, 2 episodes ago we did the planning for the year and then we talked about getting ourselves organized, and so how do we manage that excitement and make sure we don't go too big too fast.
So I think exercise is kind of like the perfect example, right? Because so many people set a new year's resolution to exercise more. And I've definitely done this in the past. I would get really excited and I would start exercising every day in January. I'm like, oh this is awesome, I'm going to exercise every day or like 5 days a week or whatever, but then it's too much right? I went too big. I can't go from no exercise to five days a week and think I'll just be able to maintain that easily. Of course it makes sense that when you do that you're going to burn out.
I think especially in the exercise case we all know what the typical advice is, in order to maintain it, which is to start small. You know, maybe you start exercising 1 day a week and then you keep that up for a little bit, and then you move up to 2 days. Or you can do the opposite where if you are going to exercise every day you know set a goal to do like 5 or ten minutes of exercise every day and then slowly build up so you're doing more, that kind of a thing. It's basically more like a slow build rather than starting big.
I want to go back to something I said, I think it was in the episode when we talked about the planning. I think what happens, and what I realized is helpful for me, is sort of like the fix for this, is to going to that long view or to that future view.
So whatever goals that I've set for myself, or resolution, whatever you call it, is thinking about, okay because I think for me what trips me up is, after we do our planning, we're all excited to achieve our goals right? It's like we've got the excitement and the motivation right now. And then sometimes it can almost feel demotivating or maybe demotivating isn't the right word, but it's really hard hard to start small when you've got that energy and that excitement around your goals at this time of year.
Because you might actually, on any particular day, like let's go back to the exercise example, you might really be excited to exercise, so you might on that one particular day, you might want to do thirty minutes. So it feels counterintuitive because you might have the excitement and you might want to do more, but you almost have to intentionally hold yourself back, knowing that you are purposely trying to avoid this burnout, this New Year's burnout.
So that's why I wanted to talk about this because at least for me, I feel like a lot of people experience this. I don't know if you do, but it's that weird disconnect where you want to go strong because you have the energy and the excitement and the motivation right now, and so it would feel natural to kind of follow that, but you almost have to at this time, kind of counteract that, just being aware because we know it's going to happen right?
I mean, it's happened to me so many years in the past that I've done this to myself. So it's like, even though I know I have the energy right now, I know that if I do too much, I am going to burn myself out on it or just lose the motivation, so I have to kind of purposely go slower. And what helps me to go slower is by going into that future view, going into the future and looking at okay, how am I going to feel at the end of 2022.
So let's go back to the exercise example just since we're on that and it's an easy one. So let's say I decide to do a slow build in the sense that I'm going to start out doing one day of exercise, let's just say for twenty minutes. So I'll exercise for twenty minutes once a week for the first 2 months of the year, January and February. So for a month or 2 I'm only going to exercise one day a week for twenty minutes and then once that becomes a habit, for the next 2 months, March and April, I'll exercise for twenty minutes for 2 days a week and keep building up that way so then 2 months after that, May and June, then I'll move it up to 3 days a week so it's like a slow build.
So it might not feel super exciting at the beginning because you're only doing it once a week, but if I think of this going out into the future thinking, like okay how am I going to feel at the end of 2022 if I can say that I successfully exercised once a week for the first 2 months of the year, and then for the next 2 months I exercised 2 days a week, and then 3 days a week by the next 2 months, and then by the end of the year I could build up a habit of exercising for twenty minutes a day 3 to 5 times a week?
If like you could easily build that into a habit by doing it slowly over time, and even if you're doing the other approach to building up slowly where maybe you're exercising every day or starting out five days a week but you're only doing like five minutes or so and then adding time as you go doing that slow build, but think how amazing it's going to feel at the end of the year when you can say that this is now a habit and that you've done it consistently throughout the year.
So that's why I really love constantly reminding myself of the future view or the long view. When I'm starting out slow on things, and it doesn't feel motivating or it feels like I'm barely doing anything at all, but when I look at it in the future and can see how that will feel to have done this, these small actions consistently over the course of the whole year, then all of a sudden it looks like much more of an accomplishment than it feels in the beginning when I'm only doing a little bit of work on it, if that makes sense. So I think that's a really helpful mindset shift in helping to stay motivated towards working towards our goals without going too big too fast and then just burning ourselves out and kind of giving up on the whole thing.
So I hope that's helpful. It's just the way that my brain works, so I just want to offer that to you if this is something that you experience as well, and hopefully it'll be helpful for you too. So let me know what you think. Send me a DM on Instagram. I always love to hear from you and I will talk to you next time.