How to Avoid Solopreneur Burnout (but not feel guilty for working hard)

If you're a small business owner wearing too many hats, working into the night, and starting to resent your clients: Welcome to burnout territory. This episode is for you. 

Here's what makes this conversation about burnout different than others you've heard: I'm not going to tell you to slow down or do less. I'm here to help you figure out which season of business you're in, and whether the over-work you're experiencing is intentional or quietly breaking you. 

I understand entrepreneur burnout. Not in a clinical way, but in a "One time I literally hopped to a business meeting on one foot after pulling an all-nighter because I refused to stop working" kind of way. My take is, for entrepreneurs, having work-life balance isn't about not working hard; it's about being intentional about when you push and when you don't.

In this episode you'll learn:

• The 3 seasons entrepreneurs cycle through: push, sustain, and ride
• Why solopreneur burnout doesn't always look like a physical collapse (it looks like dreading your inbox, resenting clients, and questioning if you're cut out for this)
• How to stop feeling guilty for working hard
• The client communication boundary that dramatically lowered my running stress levels
• Why overwhelmed small business owners often have a capacity-math problem
• The simple calendar change I made that lowered my cortisol

Been white-knuckling your way through a season that was only supposed to last a few weeks and is somehow now just... your life? Let's help you find your way back.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Booked Out Offers (coming soon — exclusive to MMM students)
• Magic Marketing Machine

Connect with Jenna: @JennasPaige on Instagram

🎉 Get clients from Instagram! Tap here to work with Jenna Harding  inside Magic Marketing Machine!

https://www.magicmarketingmachine.com

✨Tap here to watch a FREE masterclass on “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/evergreen-webinar-registration/

Tap here to get your free Posts That Sell Template (This caption got us 10 sales calls in 3 hours)

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/10-sales-calls-new

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

how to avoid burnout as a solopreneur

Jenna Harding (00:00)
In my 20s, I put myself in hospital because I was working so hard and burning the candle at both ends.

And before you say, did she mean to say in the hospital? No, I don't because I speak the Queen's English because I'm Canadian and in hospital is actually accurate, but it did feel weird coming out of my mouth. I put myself in the hospital because I was working a bunch of bartending and serving jobs, burning myself out because I had a goal in mind.

If you are a business owner and you are wearing all the hats and you are feeling burnt out or you feel like that burnout is approaching, maybe you're at the point right now where you're starting to get a little overwhelmed, you're working into the evenings, you're overworking, you're tired, you're starting to feel resentful of your clients. Whew, let's talk about it. I'll tell you the story about the hospital thing.

End.

a few things that you can start integrating into your life, because we're not gonna probably change this overnight, but a few things we can start integrating into your business and your life to help avoid you pushing things as far as I pushed them.

What's funny about this hospital story is I have always told it as a badge of honor, like, ha, ha, look how hard I worked. Ha, ha, ha. I'm, I'm so dedicated to my goals. And that is, think, social conditioning, right? We're conditioned to work hard. We're conditioned to.

where busyness is a badge of honor, they say. And that's exactly, I still sometimes, to be honest, tell this story as like a funny story, but really it isn't, and it could have gone much worse. I'm gonna be honest with you, I have going for me as an entrepreneur is I am a generally energetic person, and I get that from my mom. We go fast, we have lots of energy.

I don't deal with chronic illnesses like maybe you do. I don't have yeah, like my experience might be very different from your experience. And I just want to acknowledge that before I give you some advice. So this isn't a clinical conversation about burnout. It's an anecdotal one. And I'm just trying to help. And I'm trying to help in a lighthearted way.

Firstly, if you're listening to this podcast while cleaning the house because you're trying to consume as much business knowledge as you can because you're so dedicated to your job except you also want to be doing something else and maybe you're even scrolling on Instagram looking up content ideas while you're listening and cleaning the house, been there too. What a sign that you might be overworking yourself.

if you saw someone book a sales call on your calendar and you thought, man, I'm glad that that lead came in, but I'm scared to get on that call and I'm too busy to get on that call and can't really take on more work right now. Yeah, that's another indicator as well.

So the first thing we're gonna do is think about how you would prefer to feel. Do you like the chaos of doing three things at once? if not, how would you like your afternoon to feel? some of us thrive on,

problem solving. Some of us thrive on client delivery. Like what would you like your time to be spent predominantly doing? And even if it's gonna take us a little while to get there, it is so important to set your sights on

When you're inside this level of busyness, so easy to either what you're doing right now or what you don't want to be doing. But in order to create the life you want, we do need to picture it. How much spaciousness do you want? How much client work do you want?

What do you want to spend most of your day doing? How much do you want to work? At least set your sights on it. And even if it's still a year away, set your sights on it and slowly and surely you're going to be making choices that get you closer to that.

What a lot of people will tell you is that you can't just choose an end date and go, when this happens, I'll In the future, things will be different and you need to start making changes now. Now I'm gonna push back on that a little because speaking as a generally energetic person, I think it's okay. And a healthy person, you with a healthy body, I think it's okay to have a season of push.

The way I see it, there's three seasons. You can have a season of push, a season of sustain, or a season of ride. And I think it's okay to choose to be in any one of those seasons. So a season of push might look like you have a live launch coming up and you're gonna work after dinner some nights and you're going to, you know, burn the candle a little. You might skip lunch, you might work through it because you're excited about this season of push.

and you know that ⁓ it's project-defined. We're not gonna be here for a year. We're gonna be here for a couple weeks or maybe a couple of months. And if your body can handle it and you're excited about what you're doing, let yourself be in a season of push.

If you're in a season of push right now and you don't like it, then you're going to want to aim for a season of sustain.

After your season of push, we have a season of sustain. When you're in sustain, you are working, you're doing your job, and you are quietly building machines and systematizing it so that you can work your nine to five or however many hours a day you wanna work, and then tap out. Sustain is about quietly building while delivering. And then we have your season of ride.

That's when you ride it out. You do as little as possible for me and my business. This means summer break. We do kind of the bare minimum or things that excite us, but let ourselves just ride through the summer on the systems we have built during sustain and on the sales we have made during

So if that's a helpful way to look at it, then we've immediately eliminated the guilt of being in push, right? Because when you're feeling burnt out, I think another big problem with that is you start feeling guilt for pushing too hard and for opening your phone and seeing all these people talking about slow business and prioritizing family and all these things that then make you feel bad for caring about your business and working hard at it. I think it's okay as long as we have seasons and as long as you're keeping your body well.

when I was in my twenties and I was trying to be an actor and I was also bartending and serving and really taking kind of any money that I could get my hands on. Like I would work for whatever that I could do. And at the same time, I've never told you about this, but I was also

Co-running a YouTube channel where we did flash mobs

And it was actually like a really viral YouTube channel that I ran with a friend and we would organize these like citywide events that hundreds of people would come out to and whatever, that's different story for a different day. Actually, let me know because I would love to have the guy that originated this company that I worked with, Cole, I'd love to have him on the show. So if you want to hear about that organization and how we went viral before going viral was a thing.

Please comment, me know, DM me, and then I'll pressure him to come on in and chat with you.

I'm doing the acting thing, I'm doing the bartending thing, and all the while, at the back of my head, I thought, well, I'll move to LA. One day I'll move to LA because that's where you make it in this industry, right? There's not a huge film and TV industry in Canada, so most people end up moving to LA if they're really gonna be big. So I had it in my head, they're like, that's what I would do. And then I thought to myself, hey, I don't even know if I like LA. I've never even been to LA.

Why am I working so hard to get to this place? I don't even know if that's actually what I should be doing. So I'll go. So I figured if I could, if I could save $10,000, then that would be enough to go for a couple months and I could take some like classes, some improv classes and watch shows and meet people and pretend to live there for a little bit to see what I actually thought. Spoiler alert. I actually hated it there. had a really fun time, but

After going, I thought, ⁓ wow, this is not what I want at all. And then shortly after,

I fell into social media and that took off. here we are. So at the time it was a season of push and it was a season of push that admittedly I took too far, but I had this end date in mind and I thought if I can just make this money, I can go do this thing. So I started taking pretty much any bartending shift that I could pick up. started serving brunch.

at this brunch restaurant and I don't know if you kind of pictured that as I said it, but bartending night, brunch morning, and it all happens on the weekend. So I would regularly basically shut down the bar, working all night, sleep for a couple hours, get up and walk to where I served brunch, unlock the door, serve brunch, sometimes walk out, go unlock the bar, serve the bar. then you're surviving on the food that these places serve, which is like nachos.

and eggs, which I later realized I'm allergic to. So, you know, it was just a big mess and I had this patch of eczema on my ankle and it was this, sounds so small, right? This little patch of eczema on my ankle and I would scratch it things like that, like skin conditions like that. One of the things that they thrive on is when you are not sleeping and stressed.

and not fueling your body. So it would get itchy and I would scratch it. And I remember I was serving brunch and I'm in these like leather boots and we had a patio. So we were constantly running in and out, in and out, in and out into the summer heat. And my ankle was just so itchy. was, my gosh, it was like driving me mental. And so I just reached down into my boot and I just like ripped at it. I just like scratched this and I I remember the relief I felt.

to finally scratch this literal itch. The day goes on, I leave brunch and I walk right to the bar, which was just down the street to then start bartending. And I told my friend who struggled with eczema, was like, this eczema on my ankle is like driving me crazy. And she goes, what you need to do is cover it in Vaseline and then wrap it in Saran wrap. I'm like, okay, great idea. So I go ahead and I do that and it's still itchy, it's still itchy. And then it was starting to ache.

near, you know, 11 o'clock at night, I was like, Hey, like friend, my ankles aching. Is that weird? And she's like, well, let me see. And we went into the kitchen and switched on fluorescent lights and I put my foot up on a step stool I was looking at my ankle and I peeled the Saran wrap back and she went quiet, but we were both looking at my ankle. And then I looked up at her

and she was quiet from being stunned at what she was seeing and she was like, ⁓ no, this is not good. is an infected situation. And I was supposed to close the bar so I didn't wanna go home because the person who closed made the most money. So I lived nearby, I

scooted home, changed my pants and put on sneakers because I could barely even get my skinny jeans off at this point over my ankle, put on sneakers, ran back, closed the bar, went home that night, and then I remember the next morning, I popped a couple Advil too or whatever, the next morning I swung my legs over the side of my bed to stand up and I couldn't stand up. But it does not stop there. Why would it stop there?

go mode and I was not caring about my body and I was not even thinking. I didn't even know the word burnout. I just knew I have a goal and I'm working toward it. And that's why I say push season is okay as long as you actually keep your body healthy and mind as well. So the next morning I was supposed to meet my friend Cole because we had a meeting about our YouTube channel.

And I was like, ⁓ man, I can't walk. But there's a different brunch place down the street from me. So if he could meet me there instead, I could probably hop there. Hop there. And I did. I said, cool. Can you me at Piston instead, was the name of the place?

And I literally hopped on one foot to get to this meeting after not sleeping for like multiple nights now and serving, serving, serving. And listen, I wasn't doing drugs. You might be listening to this and thinking I'm like coded for like, I was on drugs. I was not. This is just my personality. So I hopped there and I'm having this meeting with him and I put my foot up on a bench next to me because I thought I should elevate it because it hurt.

And I was just like going on with my conversation and there was this woman at the table next to me and I'm betting she was a mom. If not, she was an angel or just had high maternal instincts. And she leaned over and like very gently said to me, Hey, I think you should go to the hospital. And I'm so glad she did, you know, like talk to strangers, talk to strangers because it was, it was so bad. And I did go to the hospital and I thought that she was kind of overreacting.

bit at the time, obviously. But I went because she told me to. I took an Uber there and there were people all around me who were very unwell. And I won't like give you the details of what I was witnessing in that emergency room, but it was pretty scary. And ⁓ they saw me very fast.

And if you know anything about triage, you know that they only see you, and I was looking around at these people that needed help and I'm looking thinking, whoa, you guys need help. I'm just here for this silly ankle thing. And they saw me so fast. And that's when I started cluing in. ⁓ wait, maybe I am not taking care of myself. And then I sat there with the doctor and they just seemed to really disappointed in me. And he said, well, the good news is,

the infection hasn't reached your joint yet. was a Sunday at this point. So it was hard for me to even find a place to go and get antibiotics. And I did, I found a place. And then I was using like a office chair to wheel myself around my apartment that I lived in with a hundred other people. And then that night there was a play I wanted to go to and I pretty much hopped there as well.

I hopped there, I wrapped a tensor bandage around my ankle, not because I needed it, but because it was so ugly at that point and I don't think I could probably wear a shoe or I don't know what kind of shoe I managed to get on. once you're in that burnout phase and that becomes your new normal it doesn't just end. It's beyond a season of...

at that point because it's just how you're living and you're not gonna be able to just turn your brain off and be like, great, now I sustain, right? No, you gotta choose. Like if you're in a season of push, it's like, it's a couple weeks, it's a month. That's how long you can push for and maybe your body's gonna say you gotta stop. But if you just start living in this place of burning the candle at both ends and wearing all the hats and push, push and like force, force, force yourself.

go without food, go without sleep, keep yourself at max stress. It's hard to just escape from that and turn it off, right? You need to kind of come down from that over months because it's become who you are and it's become how you handle things.

let's bring this to business because in those scenarios I explained to you, bartending, you're physically running around, you don't just have like a kitchen, you don't just a cozy couch you can plop on with your laptop.

when it's physically demanding like that, I think things are go south faster. But then with business burnout, especially when you're work from home, a lot of it is more mental,

probably listening and you're going, well, yeah, I had a body part that was infected and I was risking getting a amputated, I'd probably slow down. But in business...

we don't get to see that physical representation of what you've been doing to your body as much because we're at home and the stress is mostly existing in our heads and we do still have a bed to crash on at night and we do still have a fridge full of food hopefully sitting there so we can like eat while we sit at our desks you know and when you're pushing yourself too hard in business

It's manifesting in things like resenting your clients, yelling at your spouse.

questioning yourself, questioning if you're caught out for this, questioning if.

You made the wrong decision having a hard time finding joy.

stuff like that.

So let me give you three simple things that are tweaks that you can make to climb out of it or to prevent yourself from getting to that point in general. One is super tactical. It's client communications. If you are letting your clients text you at all hours, if you are responding to your clients whenever they reach out, don't have boundaries around the communication allowed to have with

for me, that can be a fast track to burnout. And it probably comes from you caring about your clients and caring about how they perceive you and caring about the results that they get. But that was a really big one for me. And I just talked to another entrepreneur just a couple weeks ago. And one of the things that she has in her offer is you're allowed to voxer her at any given moment.

So that's fine, you can allow people to voxer you at any given moment, but when do you respond? And can you put structure around when you respond and when you check in? And can you make it so that you can see that there's a notification there and you're not gonna keep thinking about it and you're just gonna let it go until it is your scheduled time to respond?

agency, there were times when we had clients whose written communication to us always sounded kind of abrasive. And I later found out that my team was becoming afraid to open Slack because they were afraid of getting triggered by what clients were saying to them. And that sucks. That sucks so much.

And sometimes that means we need to like part ways with the client or we need to address it. One of the best pieces of advice I was ever given was written communication should be positive or neutral, but anything negative should happen on a call. And you can't necessarily demand a client do that to you or like ask them to be nicer. I don't know. I don't know.

But if that is something like you're scared to open your inbox, you're scared to open Slack, then we need to address that because We don't need that cortisol spike. And that cortisol spike isn't gonna just immediately go away after it happens.

now you have these stress hormone triggers happening all throughout the day and just like raising up your running level of stress.

So streamlining client communications, knowing what is acceptable for you, in all the different ways that you are going to be interacting with other people's energy, we need to have a plan around it. Another really positive change that I made was I found myself always waking up worried that I had a call right away or worried that I was about to be late for a call. Like pretty much every morning I woke up. So I decided to

only take calls on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And at first, that was really scary because I thought that I was going to be really inconveniencing other people. But let me tell you, my running level of stress went down so much because I knew that I wasn't just going to open my calendar and be like, somebody booked with me. I'm supposed to be there in 20 minutes. Or, somebody booked last minute. Or I was going to do this, but I didn't have it in my calendar. And now somebody booked for that slot. Like, that wasn't happening. was people can book with me on Tuesdays or Thursdays.

And then you can always say, if somebody reaches out and they can only talk to you on a Wednesday, you can make that exception for them. You can choose if you want to in that moment. But yes, changing that communication was very helpful as well.

My best one comes last, so keep listening. The second tip though is to make time to be around people who inspire you. Worst case scenario, you're only around people who drain you. Best case scenario, you are repeatedly throughout the week around people who inspire you. Maybe that means you have

accountability buddy that you meet with. Maybe that means you have a mentor. Maybe that means you're part of a networking group of people that are like very high vibe and happy.

a little bit of inspiration for the future you're building and how possible it is and how other people are doing it. ⁓ that goes a long way.

And the last one is Tactical Again. I'm launching a new program this year called Booked Out Offers You have to be a client in my program Magic Marketing Machine for access to it, but it's gonna be all about helping you hit capacity in your service-based business. So I'm really excited for that

And this is one of the things that we're going to address at the beginning, is knowing how many clients you need to hit your revenue goals, and do you actually have enough time in your calendar to do that? I was just doing a one-on-one with someone last week, and she told me her revenue goal for the year was 100K, but when we looked at her offer suite and how many hours she worked in a week, there was literally no way of getting there. There was no way of getting there. Things needed to change. Things needed to change in the structure of her work.

in her client capacity and her onboarding, like all of these things need to shift in order for her to actually have enough hours in the year to hit that goal. And I think a lot of times we skip that big picture planning

that's when you might end up working at 11 o'clock at night, because it's the only way to hit your revenue goal, because six months ago, you didn't lay out your plan on how you were gonna get there in a feasible way.

When I was doing exclusively services in a service-based business before I taught and consulted and stuff, I would often about my client capacity in terms of how much delivery I could churn out, not realizing We have to onboard these people. We have to correspond with our clients. We have to have sales calls. We have to provide edits.

We have to make time to manage our own business and market our own business. And so there's all these other things that are eating away at the time. And here I'm sitting there 10 projects on the go, and I barely have enough time in the day to do the deliverables. And then everything else gets left behind.

So no, you didn't have the capacity you thought you had.

And that makes a huge change as well

Let me know in the comments if you want, you're in a season of push, sustain, or ride, ride it out. Season of ease, as my coach would say.

I hope you found this episode helpful. I hope you don't think less of me for that whole ankle thing. I definitely learned a lot from that experience, so I can't take it back.

And I hope if you turned this on because you're feeling a bit burnt out that I offered you something that helps and that

do prioritize your health and prioritize your wellbeing and the actions that you need to take to climb out of it.