In any sphere of life, whether personal or professional it is vital to avoid burnout because “burnout is by far the biggest risk to any high achiever.” Many people have been taken out by burnout. The key is to know how to achieve balance in life. In this interview with Dale Beaumont and Domonique Bertolucci discover how to find your true balance by understanding what it takes and then actively making the necessary changes to every sphere of life.
After publishing her first book, Your Best Life, Domonique established Your Best Life Coach, a new enterprise dedicated to delivering personal coaching programs. She has personally spent over a thousand hours coaching high-achieving business owners.
How can achievers avoid burning out?
Burnout is by far the biggest risk to any high achiever. One of the programs we run at Success Strategies is True BalanceTM. I designed it because I believe balance is about so much more than having better time management or returning to a clock-on/clock-off culture.
Avoiding burnout isn’t as simple as asking a high achiever to work less, in fact burnout can often be avoided by doing more. It’s what the ‘more’ is that makes the difference. Whether or not you love the work you do, if it’s the only thing you focus on in life, you will burnout.
True BalanceTM is about understanding and managing all of our energy sources – mental, emotional, physical and spiritual. In order to avoid burnout, you need to identify what your primary energy source is. For athletes it may be physical, for entrepreneurs and executives it may be mental, and for those in more nurturing roles it could be emotional or spiritual.
Once you understand your current energy source you can make plans to recharge and re-energise in the best way for you. To achieve true balance and avoid burnout, it’s important to understand the key elements of genuine balance and to make sure that you are integrating each of these elements into your life.
These elements are:
- Time – be aware of how you spend your time and pay as much attention to your time ‘off’ as your time ‘on’. Ensure that in your time ‘off’, you are recharging in the most effective way possible.
- Esteem – ensure that you are a high achiever. Always give your best and know that it is good enough. Don’t be an over-achiever – perfectionists and ‘control freaks’ fall into this category – and stop worrying that nothing you do will ever be good enough.
- Values – you need to be clear on what your values are and ensure that you are living in alignment with them. One of the biggest sources of stress is having conflicting values. It’s important to find ways to create compromises in your life that don’t leave you feeling compromised.
- Variety – ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!’ To avoid burnout you need to ensure that you have a life filled with a rich variety of experiences, not just a single experience – even if that single experience is the one you hope will lead you to riches!
- Clarity – you need to be clear about what you are doing and why. Whether you are taking instructions from above, giving instructions to those below you, or simply following your own initiative, you need to feel that what you are doing is achieving something.
- Purpose – you need to feel that the things you are spending your time doing are real and meaningful, that you are using your unique talents and that you are giving yourself the chance to shine. You need to know that what you are doing matters.
I have never liked the term ‘work/life’ balance – this implies that life is something that we pursue when we are not at work. Our work needs to be seen as a part of our life, not separate to it. In a perfect world, we would all spend our time doing the things that we love.
Some of these things would generate income and others would expend income. Although I’m well aware that the world isn’t a perfect place, if we strive for True BalanceTM in our lives, we will get a lot closer to this nirvana.
Find more of Domonique Bertolucci’s wisdom in “Secrets of Great Success Coaches Exposed!” by Dale Beaumont.
