Ready Set Coach Podcast

Working Your Way Through Burnout with Burnout Prevention Coach Amanda Nowak

• Emily Merrell and Lexie Smith • Season 2 • Episode 98

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In this episode, burnout prevention coach Amanda Nowak shares her journey from the brink of burnout to building a more sustainable business model. Amanda found a renewed sense of purpose by streamlining her client base and shifting her workload from 70-80 hours a week to a more manageable 20-30 hours. She emphasizes the importance of aligning your business with your core values rather than chasing traditional notions of success.

Lexie and Amanda discuss practical strategies for those currently grappling with burnout. Amanda stresses the necessity of carving out small moments for self-care, such as meditation or quiet reflection, to combat the stress from the daily grind. She provides actionable advice on delegation, encouraging listeners to let go of perfectionism and trust others with responsibilities. Amanda’s insights serve as a guiding light toward reclaiming balance and fulfillment in your professional life.

Here’s what you’ll learn: 

  • Amanda shares her experience of hitting burnout despite external success, highlighting the disconnect between achievement and personal fulfillment.
  • Discover the importance of aligning your business practices with your core values, such as peace and freedom.
  • Learn how to analyze your business model to improve efficiency and profitability, reducing unnecessary workloads.
  • Understand the significance of starting with small, manageable changes to combat overwhelming feelings and stress.
  • Explore techniques for calming your mind each morning to set a positive tone for the day.
  • Gain insights into the challenges of delegation and how to trust others with responsibilities, even if mistakes happen.
  • Implement daily rituals, like reflecting on your to-do list, to promote mental clarity and reduce nighttime anxiety.
  • Recognize personal habits and beliefs that contribute to burnout, such as perfectionism and overcommitment.
  • Consider hiring experts or contractors for specialized tasks to relieve pressure and improve efficiency.
  • Emphasize the importance of regular check-ins with yourself to assess your workload, values, and overall satisfaction in life and work.

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Lexie Smith  

Hi guys. You're back with Lex this week, and I have a very timely guest with me, timely for my life, as you guys will hear on this therapy session. I mean, podcast pod, podcast chat we have today. But Amanda, welcome to the show officially.


Amanda Nowak  

Thank you for having me.


Lexie Smith  

So let's dive right in. I first, okay, I lie, guys. Let me back up for a second. Emily and I for the community, we decided to do a little bit of divvying up. You know, her recorded episode and I recorded an episode because we found that trying to coordinate three schedules is a lot more challenging than one of us. So when we looked at all the people we wanted to have on the show, and we saw burnout prevention. She's like, Lexie, you're taking this one because you need it like, I'm not called out, am I? So with that said, I'm really excited to learn more about what you do. Let's start with what exactly, what type of coaching or practice you offer.


Amanda Nowak  

Yeah. So I work with women entrepreneurs who are in that overwhelmed phase of their business. They


Lexie Smith  

raise his hands,


Amanda Nowak  

but typically, in that part where you've grown it to a point where it's quote, unquote successful, but there are not enough hours in the day, you feel like you are drowning. You can't keep your head above water, and it's frustrating. You can't do the things that you want to do, because your business is kind of taking over your life. So I work with women to figure out how to move forward in a slow and sustainable way so that they can live lives they love and that they feel fulfilled by and follow their own path of success, and that society is like many of us have.


Lexie Smith  

Okay, so before I pick your brain on all the things selfishly, I have to ask how you got into this land of work. Is it, did you experience something similar, or what came before today?


Amanda Nowak  

Oh, I sure did in 2012 I started and because my background is in interior design of all things, so I started a business in 2012 where I sourced accessories for big Senior Living companies. So anytime they had a renovation, we did all the finishing touches. So I grew that business really big, where I had, you know, 5000 square foot warehouse and a big team, and we were doing seven figures a year, which is, you know, of course, like the number everyone wants to hit, right?


Lexie Smith  

No small feat.


Amanda Nowak  

And you think like this, this is success, right? Well, of course, I was miserable, and I didn't want to tell anybody I was miserable, because I feel so shameful, because you've gotten to this place that you should be so grateful, like you've built this thing, and it's so wonderful. So in 2021 my husband and I went on the first vacation since COVID, and the first night at dinner, I had a breakdown, and I told him how I hated my business and I didn't want to do it anymore, and I just wanted to, like, walk out, never touch it again. I don't care if I was in a bazillion dollars of debt, like, I just I couldn't do it anymore. And so my husband's also an entrepreneur, and is very supportive. And he was like, you know, you can do that, but maybe we should think of a way to, you know, baby step out of this. And so I was working with two coaches at the time. And so we figured out, how could we make life more sustainable for me, while I figured out a way to exit or whatever else. So we restructured my business. And because, I mean, to be honest, I was like, you get so big, so fast, that there's just so many things you just do, and it may not be the best operations or best structure, so I had to look at everything, and I figured out that my biggest client, we weren't making any profit on them. And so it was restructuring how we worked with clients, the way we did business, some of the operational type things. So once I figured out how to run the business in a more efficient way, everything else fell into place. I was able to shrink my team. We worked with less clients, but they were more profitable. And so I would say, like a year later, I was working only 20 to 30 hours, instead of 70 to 80. We were doing the same amount of revenue with less people, and obviously way more profit. So it was not an easy feat, and I needed help to do it like I never would have done it myself. So, you know, the next year was great, like I was living my best life. But then I also realized that maybe I was kind of done with the interior design world I had. I felt like I had done everything I could. The world changed a lot in especially in that world since 2020 with all the supply chain stuff. And I started doing some coaching on the side, and I found that I really loved it. It, and I realized there's a lot of women out there, like me that needed help getting out of this drowning like I mentioned. And so, yeah, it just seemed like the road to follow, and that I could actually help people not do the things that I did, create lives that they loved, instead of again, following this, like this path of build this huge business, and you know, it'll be great and everything will will be lovely. It's more now, okay, what do you actually want? And you know that doesn't necessarily have to be growing and scaling. It's figuring out what you want and how to build your business around your life, and not your life around your business.


Lexie Smith  

So here's where I want to go with this, because I think that what's really compelling or unknown to me is, while we can talk about things that you should do or you could do if you're starting tomorrow, to prevent getting to that point, what about when you're Lexie Smith, you're drinking the fire hose and you're in it, and all of a sudden, you look around yourself and you're like, wow, how did, how did this happen? I don't even have time to shower, let alone think of you know how to recoil this back. So how? What's the first step for someone like me. And I'm also curious, not to double stack questions, if you're working with people who are in it, or if, generally, they come to you before.


Amanda Nowak  

So to address the first question, the first thing you have to like, you have to make time like it won't magically appear out of nowhere. So, and it and it doesn't have to be, I'm taking a week off to figure this out. It can be small things. So I tell all of my clients and like, first, like, it's, you know, in the coaching world, like we have to prove it can be done, right? So if it starts with five minutes that you sit somewhere and just, you know, have five minutes to yourself in your car and you shut your eyes and take deep breaths, you have to start somewhere. So with this, I will tell my clients like, Okay, is there a 20 minute chunk you can take this week to think about what are my numbers look like? Is there a way to audit? Because I know auditing your entire client list to be like, who's making us money is a big thing. But can you look at one of them and say, Okay, here's what's working well, here's what's not a lot of the time. It's like we just need to take the time for ourself to calm ourselves down. Because when we come at things from a place of calm, we see more things versus when we're just on this, like cortisol hive, like everything's happening and I need to do it all, we just, we don't see a lot of things because we are so stressed out, so taking a few minutes for yourself to calm down, and then also chunking it out in small, small pieces. So for example, if it's like something with operations, you're picking one thing this week, only one thing, because I know the other thing that people like this like to do, myself included, is you go, Okay, well, I'm going to make this giant list and make this huge strategy, but then that overwhelms us even more. So I like to compare it to anyone who has ever been on like, a diet or wanted to get healthier in their life, if we do one of those really restrictive programs where it's like, you can't have sugar, you can't have carbs, you can only eat vegetables for a month, most people don't make it the month. But if we say, Okay, this week, no snacking, just that the whole week. And then maybe next week, we pull in one more thing of like, okay, next week, drink more water, doing it that way, you're typically going to stick with it and actually see results, versus throwing everything at it all at once.


Lexie Smith  

I literally just looked around because I was about to hold up to camera my goldfish bag, because I tend to notice that when I'm in the fire hose moments I'm maybe not ironic, is not the word. It's not ironic. I'm treating myself poorly. I'm drinking more coffee. I'm drinking I'm eating more snacks. I'm doing the things that I know are exactly the opposite of what I need to get out of this. And it's an interesting and very vulnerable thing for me to admit on this podcast that I'm in this moment right now because there was a section of my life, especially through Ready Set coach, when we were doing the group program where I preached a lot of how not to get to this point. And then all of a sudden I wake up, and here I am, and I think, what are there things that you know, if you're not quite at burnout mode, routines you can instill check in points to do, like, how do you advise? Are there little things we can do before we get here, so that it's not so much scrambling to fix? Sit and we don't get here all of a sudden,


Amanda Nowak  

yeah, and I'll say one thing that I and I mean, I did this when I started my business, I didn't look at what I actually wanted out of having a business, and I didn't look at my values. So at that breakdown moment, I realized that, like, two of my values were peace and freedom, but I had these giant fire hose clients that I couldn't say, oh, we can't take any more jobs. It had to be like, we either work with you or we don't. So I thought back to that. I'm like, you know, if I would have had those values and like, a direction in the beginning, I probably wouldn't have taken on that client knowing that I had no control of it. I couldn't adjust the faucet. And so I would say checkpoints. One thing I tell if you can do it, take time every morning to like, I say, meditate. It doesn't have to be like anything. Like you don't have to sit and listen to a guided meditation. If you just sit there and take deep breaths for five to 10 minutes, it helps your system Calm down, and it just helps you start the day from a less stressed place, instead of like picking up your phone while you're still in bed and looking at emails


Lexie Smith  

so not called out. It's fine again. There's


Amanda Nowak  

no judgment, because it's all the things that I used to do, but that like we're immediately in that stressed out like frantic state before we even start the day. So if we can not pick up our phone right away, take five minutes. Take some deep breaths if you want to do longer, more organized practice. Have at it. But that has been one of the biggest things that helped me. And again, it was like proving that I could take time for myself, even though it was small, because for so long, like my limiting belief was I don't have time. I don't have time to do it. I don't have time to do all these things for myself, but the truth was, I chose not to, and by choosing not to, it was screwing everything else up, because it's like the dominoes. So the taking that time for yourself, another thing that helps me a lot, and I tell this to my clients, is at the end of the day, when you're you've had a stressful day, and everything is you know in your head, taking five minutes before you go to bed, and emptying your head of all the things that you have to do tomorrow, your to do list, to just get in a more peaceful mode before you go to sleep, because otherwise you wake up at 3am and are like, I forgot about this thing. And then you stay awake for another half an hour. So, you know? So it's kind of like the book ends of, like, getting yourself calm in the morning, at the end of the day, getting rid of everything. I also am a big like, ritual person, of like, okay, so I do that thing, and then maybe I make myself a cup of tea before I go to bed, being like, I'm not thinking about work anymore. Now is the wind down time before I go to sleep, because again, I was the person that was on my laptop until 1130 and then I brushed my maybe I brushed my teeth and wash my face, if I wasn't so exhausted, and then I would just collapse into bed and wouldn't have a good night's sleep, would wake up and start the vicious cycle all over again.


Lexie Smith  

It's really interesting for me to hear what you're saying, because I believe in it full heartedly, and in some level, I know it. And for those who have listened to this show and they know my story, I got into entrepreneurship post a huge burnout, where I landed in the hospital, and I really did reclaim my life. So it's almost frustrating now, circa however many years it's been that I'm kind of starting to get back to the same place, and it's making me have these thoughts of, is this just me? Is this just going to be like, every five years I'm going to hit burnout again, and is it cyclical? And I'm curious if you notice trends in people who who burn out, if there's hope for people like me or I don't know, again, I told you this was gonna turn into a therapy session,


Amanda Nowak  

but here we are. I'm here for it. So I joke that it's like the Taylor Swift song, like it's me, hi, I'm the problem. It's me. So our jobs and our businesses are not the things that burn us out. It's how we are. So like me, I was a perfectionist. I was a hard worker. That's why I did great in corporate America, because I just kept I would take the things and I would do it. And so because I also got burnt out in my corporate job when I left there to go into entrepreneurship, which I thought would have more peace and freedom, and then created my own personal hell again. So it, I mean, it's us, so it's like we have to do the work on ourselves. Yes, we can change our businesses, but. We can change our businesses, and if we still have those perfectionist I have to, I have to work so hard to do this thing and be successful, nothing's going to change, like we're still going to be on that hamster wheel. So, I mean, one something I teach a lot of my clients is detachment, and that, like some things, we just gotta let it go. Because especially like when I had a team, there were so many times that I would say, Well, I can't give this to somebody else, because they're not going to do it as well as I will, and then I'm just going to have to do it over again. But I know, as you're covering your face.


Lexie Smith  

Now look for YouTube. You can see how epically, like heard, I feel. Continue, sorry, just Yeah, yep,


Amanda Nowak  

check, yeah. So it's one of those things where you have to give it a shot. So, like, I know delegating is another thing I talk about a lot, but giving that thing to somebody else and figuring out a way that they can be successful doing it so it's completely taken off your plate, huge, and knowing that there will be mistakes, but you can fix them, just letting it go. And also some things that we feel like you mentioned should, should is like such a freaking dirty word, uh, but we should do this. We should do that. Do we have to do a lot of it? Not necessarily like I think about networking, like in my old business, people like, you should be networking twice a week, and you should be doing this. Well, it didn't necessarily matter for my business, so I didn't. But so many people were just like, well, how can you not do this and blah, blah, blah. But didn't make sense for me. I didn't do it. So it's like so I have this great example of something that I held on to forever, that I didn't have to so in this business, we ordered so much product, I used to do all the ordering. And it took me 30 hours a week to do all this ordering, because it was from so many different vendors and so many different projects. My admin, who was, like, my right hand person, I at 1.1 of my coaches, was like, Could you hand that off to her? Do you think she could handle it? And I just kept thinking, it's going to be a lot. It's going to be hard for me to give it to her. I don't know if she's going to like doing it. So I just asked, I said, Would you be willing to do this? And she looked at me and said, Well, yeah, I would love to do that, because I'm already tracking where all the product is going anyway, so that would actually make my job easier. So I handed it over to her. It took a couple weeks to figure it out, and she still had some questions, but it got to a point where she was so good at doing that thing. She was 100 times better at it than I was. She was way more accurate than I was, and she could do that job in half the time that I did, and then I just didn't even have to touch it. So that saved me 30 hours out of my week. Once I passed that off to her, and I would say, within a month, she was barely asking me any questions. So it truly was like a delegation. I never had to think about it again.


Lexie Smith  

I hear that story, and I I struggle with knowing if I'm the Taylor Swift, Hi, I'm the trouble. It's the problem. It's me, and I don't know how to adequately train and develop because I've had challenges with delegation, and maybe it's my anal retentive diffs, you know, needs things a certain way. And I'm curious if, in that process, if you know, or if you've ever encountered something in the delegation where they don't do great, right? And then it kind of makes you feel a little bit jaded, and maybe how you you work through that and and stay positive and don't just go back to, okay, I'm just going to do everything myself once again. Because that's every time I feel like I try and it doesn't work out, I revert back to, you know, I was the girl in school who was like, Hey everyone, I'll just do the full tea project. You just show up. Don't worry.


Amanda Nowak  

We don't have control issues at all, not at all. Yes. Of course, I had tons of people who did not live up to the challenge. When I said, here's this thing, can you do it? A couple things I learned about that is, there are some people that I had, the wrong people in the wrong positions where I thought, okay, because they know how to do this, they'll be great at that. Like, management is a perfect example of because somebody's good at their job does not mean they're good at managing processes or people. Like, I had a situation with my warehouse where I had, I put a couple of people in a spot where I'm like, Okay, you run the warehouse, the ins and outs, and it was just too much for them, so I had to then come back into the process. So when that happens, two things, one, I've had to change what people do. So it's like, okay, well now you can't do that, so we're going to put you. Were here, I've had to let people go. Because, you know, sometimes you have people that say, I want more responsibility, I want to make more money, I want to grow in the company. But it's looking at their job trajectory too, like, well, this position that makes this much money and has this much responsibility has to do these things. If you can't do those things, that is not the position for you when I've had so in that 2021 I had people that were not ready to grow to the next level. And to be honest, I didn't have the time to grow them to the next level. So what worked for me is contractors. So I hired experts who could so, you know, I was paying more per hour, but I also wasn't paying benefits, payroll tax, all those things, and I wasn't having to train them, because they knew how to do it. So, for example, I had somebody come in and figure out how to make our warehouse run more efficiently. So he figured it out in a week or two, and then I could take that back to my my worker bee people, and say, Okay, here's how we're going to run it. Here's steps, 12345, some other examples, like social media. I paid somebody to do that because it was something that at one point I had somebody doing part time. They weren't an expert in it. I couldn't expect them to be. So I paid somebody who was an expert to do it. Yeah, I failed a lot in hiring people, hiring the wrong people, me not having the right expectations. And, I mean, I was far from a perfect boss, and I think in this whole process too, I realized I was really good at managing about three people, but I think beyond that was too much for me, and I did not enjoy it. So,


Lexie Smith  

yeah, wow, I am you in 2021 there's so much, so many through lines in this conversation, and I'm curious now to turn it back to kind of how you work with clients today. Is talking through these things part of the process. Are you more focusing on kind of helping them get realignment and the things outside of business or career? Maybe they're all corporate professionals. Can you kind of share with me a bit more about what that container looks like? Yeah.


Amanda Nowak  

So mainly, I'm working with women entrepreneurs. The big in the beginning, we kind of do the big brain dump of, like, what's going on, what's working, what's not. Then we figure out, where do you actually want to be? Like, what do you want your life to look like? Which sometimes is hard, because I remember somebody asking me, Well, what do you want? And I thought, I don't know. Just not this. I don't know, but we kind of work on that to figure out, like, what does your ideal life look like? How can we get you closer to that at the end of, you know, I do like, a three or six month engagement, then we look at, okay, what's not working? How can we change that? Can we delegate are there things you can completely let go of, you know, and just kind of then taking those small steps. I hold my clients accountable. That's a big thing, because I know, especially when you're running a business, it's not like back in the day where and you were at a corporate job and you had buddies where you could be like, Hey, how do you do this? When you're the head of a business. It's kind of lonely, and you don't necessarily have that buddy to be like, you know, can you give me some feedback? How does this work? So I hold them accountable. We kind of figure out, we meet every two weeks. We say, okay, for next next session, what do we want to accomplish? I check in the week in between be like, how are you doing? What's going on? And I'm also available in between sessions, because I know sometimes things come up of like the Oh crap, I hate everything, and I don't know I'm going to get through this. So sometimes we have little pep talks through text and email. But my goal in that time of working together is getting my clients in a better place, whether that's figuring out how to carve out more space for themselves and taking care of themselves, how to restructure their business, everybody's different and has different things that are kind of their pain points. So I'm a little bit customizable in that way, but the goal really is to just, you know, get them closer to the life they want to leave and make it not so miserable.


Lexie Smith  

So another question I have for you is because one of my things that stresses me out most is when either in just context, I have a PR agency and I also have a coaching practice in this community. So in the coaching side and the agency side, one through line, that I have found to be incredibly stressful is working with people when they're in a high state of overwhelm. And I can imagine that is literally who you are working with, at least for the first. Part of your engagement. So how do you I guess, are you just unfazed? Have you adapted ways to kind of leave that at the office, just working with people in this kind of fight or flight stage? How do you do that? I can't imagine. Like, do you have any advice tips? Like, I'm just curious to hear your perspective.


Amanda Nowak  

Yeah, it's funny. I don't know if you've ever watched that movie Office Space.


Lexie Smith  

I know of it, but I'm not going to probably be able to see the scene. It's been a minute.


Amanda Nowak  

Well, there's a part where the main character, he's working in this ridiculous corporate office, and he's got, you know, nine bosses, whatever, and he goes to this hypnotist, and he comes out of hypnotist just being very zen and like, they're called, he's like, I'm just not going to go to work anymore. And is just like, whatever, everything's fine. At some point in this journey, I reached that Zen point of like, this is fine. Everything's gonna get done. I don't have to be concerned about this. Whereas, if you're to look at me in 2021 and 2022 I was just like, Oh my God. I was just so revved up constantly. And I think too you mentioned like a health journey. I in 2021 my adrenals were shot, and I had all these other things. So I think there's just a point where I had to, and I use this example a lot of like putting my own oxygen mask on first. And so when I'm working with these clients that are revved up like I do have a meditation practice in the morning, I like live my life more slowly now, and I do kind of have those rituals, like, before I sit down for a coaching session, I'll kind of just take a minute and be like, Okay, what do I want to accomplish in this time? When I'm done, I kind of take a few deep breaths and let it go. I think I carried so much for so long that it got to a point where it wasn't sustainable, and so I had to come up with those practices to not be so connected to it, not like one of my favorite sayings, is not my circus, not my monkeys. I was I like that. Yeah, there was a lot of circuses I did not belong in. So again, so glad, like, just detachment and being like, this is not me. I need to, you know, be concerned about this, not this. So, you know, with our clients, it's like they have us for that 45 minutes to an hour. We do what we can to help them and get them through their journey. But then, you know, once we're done with that time, it's like, okay, decompress. Now I need to go on to the next thing. Yeah, it's, it's tough, but


Lexie Smith  

there's you're, you're reminding me that there's light at the end of the tunnel. So that, in itself, is a gift. And in a minute, we're gonna let everyone know where they can connect with you. But one thing we do at the end of every episode of the show is we assign some sort of homework. And when we have a guest on, I like to pass that baton. I gladly pass that baton to you. And, you know, just to kind of, I think it's worth kind of reminding, you know, people listening to the show are at various stages. We might have some people who are still at corporate considering coaching. We might have people who are at the height of their coaching career. You might have people like me who are like, what would be a homework you want to offer today?


Amanda Nowak  

The homework I would offer today is taking five minutes for yourself every morning. It like I said, it doesn't have to be anything crazy. If you have kids running around everywhere, go in the bathroom and lock the door and sit on the toilet seat and take deep breaths for five minutes. But just doing that, I bet will make a huge difference.


Lexie Smith  

And it's so funny how how small that sounds. But to your point like, I'm like, Wow, that sounds hard. I'd have to really, like, lock the door. It's great homework I'm gonna take I'm gonna take that with me too. And last but not least, where can people go to learn more about working with you and connect. Yeah,


Amanda Nowak  

you can find me on Instagram at element dot 8e, i, G, H, T, dot coaching, or on my website, element dash the number eight.com,


Lexie Smith  

Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show today for sharing just a snippet of your brilliance and sharing your story and letting me word vomit all my personal woes on you. It was truly helpful and like a very weird sign from the universe, yet again, that I ended up on this call with you today, but you guys always please. Is if something one of our guests shares resonates with you, let them know. I think this world needs to be better at letting people know that we hear them and we see them. So thank you so much. And the last thing you are required to do is awkwardly sing our outro, and our outro just goes the Ready Set coach podcast and whatever musical note comes out of your mouth, and don't worry, I'm going to do it with you. So on the count of three, thank you guys for tuning in to the Ready Set coach podcast. Yes, it's always that awkward. Thanks, guys. Bye. You.