Recognizing and Overcoming Burnout

Burnout is more than just exhaustion—it’s a signal that something needs to change. In this powerful episode of Friday Feelings, we dive into the realities of burnout with entrepreneur and advocate Alex Buckles. Alex shares his personal stories of navigating burnout during pivotal moments in his life and career, offering a raw and relatable look at the impact it has on mental, emotional, and physical well-being.

Through candid conversations, we explore the warning signs of burnout, how it manifests in personal and professional contexts, and actionable strategies to regain balance. Alex reveals the habits, boundaries, and support systems that helped him recover and thrive, including the role of self-awareness and prioritizing what truly matters. Whether you're approaching burnout or simply want to guard against it, this episode provides valuable insights to help you recognize the signs and take proactive steps to avoid it.

Key Takeaways:

• The warning signs and subtle indicators of burnout.
• Practical strategies for setting boundaries and prioritizing self-care.
• Tools for managers to identify and address burnout in their teams.

Join us as Alex Buckles shares his hard-earned wisdom and actionable advice to help you navigate the challenges of burnout and emerge stronger. Don’t just push through—transform the way you approach your well-being.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:03

Awesome. Welcome to Friday Feelings, where we turn emotions into power, vulnerability into strength, and to remind you to feel everything, fear nothing, and transform your life. Today's focus is recognizing and overcoming burnout. And this is a very special episode for me because my guest, Alex Buckles, and I have been friends, colleagues, coworkers. He has been a mentor of mine. His pursuit and his passion with his organization is incredible and awe-inspiring. And I am just absolutely thrilled to have him here as our guest today. So, Alex, thank you so much for joining me on this new adventure. And let's, I just want to hear from you a little bit about you, about forecastable, uh, and about why this topic is important to you.

SPEAKER_01: 0:53

Sure. Well, thanks for having me for one. And uh yeah, I'm happy to get right into it. So a little bit about me. Um, I uh let's see, after in terms of career, let's see, uh starting with personal. So I am married, father of three children, ages 13, 14, and 15, two girls and a boy. Uh and my son, the youngest child, is is autistic. So we've uh, you know, I've started an organization called Pathways for Autism. We're very focused on getting uh people with autism into the workforce and living, you know, uh financially independent lives. Uh, that's my life's purpose. Um, uh I've been uh after getting out of the Marine Corps in 2005, I've been uh basically in enterprise sales roles uh for the last 20 years uh for the most part. Um I've worked for small companies, big companies, SAP ecosystem, Adobe ecosystem, a bunch of startups. Uh, I've had my own startups. I've been an entrepreneur since 2009. Uh lots of little failures along the way, a couple of big ones along the way, and then uh, you know, and a few successes. And um, now we're, you know, I'm seeing more success than failure, which is a nice thing. And um, and that's that.

SPEAKER_00: 1:58

I love that. Well, I know the work you're doing with Pathways for Autism is an absolutely incredible thing. The the individuals I meet that talk about their children with autism, that the concern of a parent saying, I want my kid to be independent and successful, and you're providing that, you're highlighting that, you're teaching and employing and pouring your heart into that community. So I want to thank you for the effort that you're making and encourage any listener today. If you're looking for a resource around the autistic community, you've got to connect with Alex Buckles Online. So um, why is burnout a topic that's important to you?

SPEAKER_01: 2:37

Uh it's not really important to me. It's important to me because you asked me to talk about it and I've been through it a few times.

SPEAKER_00: 2:42

Fair enough. Fair enough.

SPEAKER_01: 2:45

It's just not something I'm like super passionate about. But as I was looking about all the things that you have coming up, I was like, huh, I've been through burnout a few times. I was like, I can definitely speak to that um in in in a few different ways. Um and I'm happy to go into any detail on it, but uh it's a very real thing, and you know, and you can only um you can only push yourself to do so much. And I can distinctly remember three different burnouts in my career. That's just I know I know when it was, I can think back to, and it's obvious when you when you look back. Um but yeah, yeah, it's it's there, and you and you have to Okay, so let's let's define it.

SPEAKER_00: 3:19

What to you, when we we say that word burnout, what is burnout to you?

SPEAKER_01: 3:24

Burnout to me is I would say when you're when I would say you're there's a couple probably a couple different ways to describe it, but I would say it's when you're probably physically incapable of being who you normally be and you can't get back to it. Like you just you know that like you maybe you've even done all the things you're supposed to do that day. Maybe you went to the gym, maybe you ate right, maybe you, you know, uh, or whatever. You did it, you know, everything perfect, and like you had a wonderful day and everything was great, and you close all kinds of deals and things happen, but you still feel like you know, at the end of the day, like it just like it just you just feel down, or you feel like you just can't perform the way you're used to performing, or you make mistakes. Um, you know, it's just it's just it's it becomes obvious when you're in it.

SPEAKER_00: 4:10

And I also think too, burnout has signals, warning signs, indicators that we don't often pay attention to. So now looking back, can you identify in your life what were those signals that either you ignored, you weren't aware of, you completely misunderstood?

SPEAKER_01: 4:32

Um, I would say the signals leading to burnout is when you start spending or when you start doing things you wouldn't normally do, or um you're spending exorbitant amount of time, uh exorbitant amounts of time, you know, on things that you shouldn't be spending them on, or you're missing family time, you know, even it's like okay, dinner time, no, no, no, one more email, let me just get this out. I gotta get it done, right? Um and you know, maybe you're not getting enough time to yourself. Like if I work, you know, I go to bed every night at 8 or 8:30. Like I'm in bed so early. And if I actually stay up and if I stay in my office till like seven o'clock, you know, then I'm only getting an hour to an hour and a half of downtime. And that includes eating dinner, that includes spending time with my wife and kids. Like, and it's like, and if you're only spending that amount of time, that's not good, that's not healthy for anybody. And I still, in that time, got no time for me to like not talk to anybody and let my brain just rest from the day. Um, so that's if you're starting to see that and you start seeing like you don't have that room for yourself and you're not making that time for yourself, I think that's to me is a good sign that you're you're entering a burnout phase.

SPEAKER_00: 5:42

Yeah. So let's hear a story. Would you share a story of how and when you burned out, maybe what led to that? And then how on the on the flip side of that, how did you work through that to come out on the other side?

SPEAKER_01: 5:56

Oh, there's a lot there. Um, let's see. So let's start out. I would say the the first burnout was December of 2012. Um, and that was I was running so many things. I was um I had so much going on. So I was working for a small software company, I was a VP of business development for them. I was basically the sole sales rep for the company, growing up for a little from uh like a greens, you know, fresh sales rep, my first sales job to sales manager to VP of business development. And at the time, since it was a small company, I got to like I started taking over all kinds of things. Like I was then taking over customer support. And so I'd close a deal, and then I was in there doing um more like customer success and support. Like I was doing project implementation and man making sure it was going really well. Um and then I ended up taking over the dev team. So I started having a lot of different responsibilities. And then the owner of that company decided he wanted to start a second company um using our own technology to um to basically get into the insurance space and go use our tech to you know create this unfair advantage as an agency. So I got licensed in all 50 states and I was like, yeah, you know, I'll just be the agency too. And you know, the agency Yeah, the agency was based in Jacksonville, Florida. And I I lived in Orlando, agency was based in Jacksonville. So I was running the software company in Orlando, driving to Jacksonville three to four days a week, and you know, and then coming home to three kids in diapers. I had them ages one, two, and three back then, pretty much, um, or zero, one, and two. I don't know. They were very, very young. Um, and that one is when I realized that like it's just it was just crazy. It was just wild. I wasn't getting sleep. Um, you know, missing critical time with family, you know, and a young family at that. Um, you know, you just you're physically unhealthy, you can know you don't have the time to do anything. Um, and so on on that burnout, like I had it, like I quit. I was just like, okay, uh, I was like, I give six months notice. I'm like, I can't do this anymore. I was like, I want to go do something else. This isn't for me, kind of a deal. Um, but you know, that was that was that. And uh, it took me, I don't know if I ever really formally recovered from that burnout because the day I quit, I was in, you know, working at a you know, I was sitting in a Panera bread for like two months on end every morning, like figuring out what I wanted to do next. And I was like, why not start a startup? So, like, why while you're in the middle of a why not?

SPEAKER_00: 8:13

Why not?

SPEAKER_01: 8:15

So I I don't really think that was a good example of of anything that I recovered from really well. I just kind of powered through it. I was you know much younger back then, so that was easier. The second burnout was a little bit more senior in my career, and that would have been that would have been around March, April of 2021. And that was nuts because um we we were, you know, we had just gone through COVID. So like we talked summer of 2020, I was leading the revenue function at a you know, uh a small professional services organization, 50 employees. Um and uh what was it? So we went through COVID, and as we were going through COVID, it's like we were dealing with large enterprise customers, and greater than I would say greater than half our forecast came to a screeching halt. It was like um, you know, uh the big customers weren't paying their bills or paying them on time, even though they could. It was just really crappy. And and we were almost had to fire like we almost had to had to let go half the organization. Like it was like and all that pressure kind of just fell on me. And it was like I just felt it, and and I was like, well, you know, we can recover from this. And we recovered by co-selling, and that's where I really got deep, deep into co-selling. We started co-selling with a bunch of reps at Adobe. We ended up recovering that forecast dollar for dollar. We didn't have to terminate, you know, or let go, but like one person, I think, in the entire during the entire debacle. Um, and then we got to like January of 2021, we had recovered or course corrected, so we had done such a sharp course correction that we over-delivered on top of funnel, and now we sold too much. And even though I was keeping the C-suite aware of like, hey, let's from a resourcing perspective, let's stack up bench, like we were doing all the right things. I was on the sales side to talk about this stuff, and it just didn't happen, you know. And so now we got to the point where we're closing deals with a super high win rate. Um, you know, after having just recovered from all the COVID madness of trying to make sure people weren't getting fired or laid off. And and then on top of it, now we're closing deals, and there's like, I don't know, a 60-day wait until you can kick off because we didn't have the right resources. So now I've got customer escalations, and the entire C-suite had no idea how to handle the customer escalations. And so I was doing the CEO's job, I was handling helping the VP of delivery figure out how to handle you know these types of escalations, enterprise stuff. Like, you know, I was managing the sales cycles. It was just like we had a suitor at the table ready to acquire the company. So we're trying to keep everything like going. Um that was that. And um, I think after I left that organization in March or April of 2021, I think I sat in my robe for about 45 days on my couch playing video games, staring at the screen, drooling.

SPEAKER_00: 11:03

Uh, you know, it's because we knew each other then. We were friends then.

SPEAKER_01: 11:07

And uh forecastable all the time.

SPEAKER_00: 11:09

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I remember in the conversations we were having, uh, not during that time period, obviously, but before and after. It was so clear that you were maxed out. That, and then after you had that little stent, you know, you kind of came back with a force to be reckoned with because you knew where you were going with forecastable, you knew what you were trying to accomplish. And again, I think you're an individual that you strive for perfection because you have a vision and you are you will sacrifice yourself to push through and achieve that.

SPEAKER_01: 11:45

That's it. Yeah. And that's a bad habit. You know, it's like it's a good and a bad habit, double-edged sword. It's like, okay, well, um, I always and I still do this today, and it's, you know, uh against my better judgment, but like sometimes you have to do what you have to do. And it's like as an entrepreneur, you have to kind of decide it's like, am I gonna do this or am I not gonna do this? And if I'm gonna do it, like you may as well go all the way and it's gonna have to dig deep and do things that other people are unwilling to do. And that's how you win. If everybody could do it and it was easy, everybody would be a founder and everybody be talking about how they created unicorns and all this stuff, but like it's it's not it's not that fun and pretty like in the trenches when you're like doing this stuff at like day to day. It really requires actual sacrifice.

SPEAKER_00: 12:25

Yeah. So in the midst of all of that and in the pursuit that you have, what do you do to make time for you?

SPEAKER_01: 12:33

One, I have an awesome wife. And she uh, you know, that having, I think, you know, not that you know, there's people that are unmarried too, but like having you know a support system, uh, whether through friends, family, you know, marriage, like that's a really big piece of it. Um, and like my wife realized, you know, that that I need a decompression time after work, and that like we uh get out of my office and sometimes there would just be questions, you know, everybody wants to see dad. And it's like question, question, question. It's like, no, dad needs to chill out and become a normal human being for a minute, like eat a snack, you know, play a video game, do something mindless. Um, and then usually after about 45 minutes, I am that normal human being and I can engage. But it took it took my wife actually figuring that out, you know, to to help me, you know, figure out how to better manage myself. So that's one way is like the having a really strong support system.

SPEAKER_00: 13:22

I love that. And I and one of the things I teach is, and I've mentioned this a couple of times, but self-awareness, emotional intelligence is not done in a silo on an island. It takes family members, friends, spouses, colleagues to sometimes help us see ourselves in a way that we can't and offer opportunities for growth and introspection and challenged a little bit, right?

SPEAKER_01: 13:49

That's it. That's it.

SPEAKER_00: 13:51

I love it. Um, so let's let's get into some advice pieces of this. So, for example, if there's a listener who would ask you a question and say, Well, Alex, I'm approaching burnout, but I don't own the company. I'm a mid-level manager, I'm a sales rep, I'm a CSM, I'm a marketing strategist. What practical advice can you give that individual to attempt to find balance?

SPEAKER_01: 14:16

There's, let's see, there's finding, let's talk about a couple of different things. Um, one, let's chat about let's chat about balance for a second. The the first is healthy boundaries, you know, like setting boundaries is a really important thing. Um, yes, you as an employee, you want to do right by your company, you want to do everything you can to do your job really well, you want to do everything you can to make as much as you can for your family and like keep your job and get promoted. Um, but especially for for high performers, like if you're a performer, you know, you can be taken advantage of, whether intentionally or unintentionally. And it's it's just really important to self-recognize that. And if you feel like, you know, hey, I don't have to take on, you know, like these extra eight hours a week you're asking me to put in, and it's like not just because like a one-time thing, it's every single week or it's 20 hours, whatever it is, like you have to ask yourself, am I personally gaining from that? You know, like I intentionally, as me as Alex, like I intentionally make decisions to work extra hours because I own the company. And I know if I do certain things, I'm like, all right, well, this sucks, but like I'm gonna do it, and I know I'm gonna get it in the end, and like I'm gonna get, you know, a great return on this. But if you're just the average employee and you don't have skin in the game and you don't have you're not gonna get that return for the extra effort, doesn't mean you shouldn't make the effort, but don't consistently make it to your own detriment for the benefit of somebody else.

SPEAKER_00: 15:43

Yeah, strong. Agreed. And that's hard to do because there's a lot of fear that if I say something, if I raise my hand, I'm gonna get a red flag on my employee profile, or I'm gonna get put on a pip, or because of the job market right now, there's so many hundreds and thousands of people that are looking for work that can replace you. So how do you say no without saying no? How do you raise your hand and say, I'm I'm approaching burnout? I love my job, I want to keep my job, but something has to shift or change.

SPEAKER_01: 16:18

I tend to approach it for me. I tend to approach it from the perspective of seeking advice. So you have a couple options. You can decide to get yourself to the point where you are burned out, and then you're like, I hate this, I'm flipping out. I saw like I don't want to do this anymore. I'm not showing up tomorrow. I'm taking a week off. Bye. And like you just like burn all the bridges and you're done.

SPEAKER_00: 16:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 16:37

Don't do that.

SPEAKER_00: 16:39

Don't do that.

SPEAKER_01: 16:40

Don't do that. Number one. Number two, like when you smell it coming, like, you know, you you can just you can um, you know, there's the direct way of saying, I'm just it depends on the relationship with your manager, depends on a lot of different things. You know, if you have a phenomenal relationship and um your manager should actually self-recognize that you're burning out and they should proactively do something about it. In the absence of that, though, um, you can directly call it out and say, look, you know, Janelle, I am like, you know, we have a great relationship, and I and I just want to call out the fact that I think I'm approaching burnout and I want to have a conversation about what we can do to help me not hit that. And I don't really have all the answers, and you may not have all the answers, but like, can we just chat about it? Because I just I'm feeling it and just talk about it. Now, the other, the third kind of not like not a little bit more indirect way to go about it is through seeking advice. So you could go and be like, hey, you know, I'd be like, Janelle, can I ask you some advice? Or and it could be could be your direct manager, it could be another manager or somebody else within the organization that's a leader and say, look, I think I'm approaching burnout. I've not been through that before. I like I'm feeling like this. I think it's like approaching burnout. What have you done in the past to like to do something like that? Like, you know, or you know, you know, as we look at my workload, do you think we could just spend some time seeing where because I don't really know where to trim? And I figured as my manager, maybe you could help me prioritize better so I'm not feeling so burned out. Do you think we can have a chat about that?

SPEAKER_00: 18:05

I love that. I love that approach. And I think it's so practical because as we learn about emotions, managing our emotions, dealing with difficult conversations, difficult people. If you don't have a healthy relationship with your manager, that's a really great approach. If you do have a healthy relationship with your manager, it's also a great approach. So I love that. So let's shift gears. So now, how do we help encourage the managers? How do you identify signals of burnout in your employees? What are you specifically looking for?

SPEAKER_01: 18:36

Um, if I were to identify burnout employees, so I've never proactively looked. I guess I just I just I guess maybe I just self-recognize, but um, let me think. So burnout for employees, I mean, you're gonna see different uh behaviors. Um I think you're gonna, I think, you know, you know the employee that you hired, you know what the best performance looks like from every single employee, and you know what subpar performance looks like for that specific employee, right? And when you start seeing missed things or things that are out of character, uh subpar performance, it's like you start asking yourself, like, you know, hey, is it uh do they just not care? And it's like, you know, that's not the answer because you know they care. And so something else must be going on, you know, and you don't want to go dig into their personal lives and all that good stuff. But um, you know, you should, as a manager, try to root that out and just say, hey, look, maybe you ask about maybe you poke around without even bringing up burnout, maybe you just poke around. You're like, hey, you know, do you think there's an area in your workload that like I'm I'm working with a whole team right now, we're trying to make sure that we're that we're we're we're bringing balance to everyone's workload. Like, where in your workload do you feel like you've got like extra work, unnecessary stuff, stuff that's just adding to your plate that just maybe weighs on you? Like just like load up, like tell me, because I'm gonna go rebalance the whole team. And and you just start asking those questions. Now, if there's real pain there, like if my manager came to me in the middle of like when I was feeling on the edge of burnout and said, What could I could you remove some workload? Like, yeah, dude, you can get me this off, you can take that, you can you know, tell you know, tell Bob to do his job, you know.

SPEAKER_00: 20:19

Sorry, I should laugh somewhere at that, but I understand that sentiment. Uh I'll live it.

SPEAKER_01: 20:25

Everyone's human.

SPEAKER_00: 20:26

Yeah, I it absolutely. And I wanna I want to shift gears just a little bit to talk about um from an emotional intelligence perspective, from a self-awareness perspective, where you start to realize that burnout is happening from a mindfulness awareness. And I think for me, the burnout piece is wanting to please everybody, feeling insecure to say no, being driven by the fear that I'm gonna be judged or looked down upon or um slated as somebody who can't live up to the expectations placed before me. I also think burnout is a trait of, and don't take this freshly, but I think burnout can come from a place of not being self-aware, not being mindful in the emotions that are happening because your thoughts literally generate your emotions. And so to feel anxious, to feel stressed, to feel the weight of pressure, to lay the expectation of perfectionism uh before you, it means that there are thoughts that are happening in your brain driving that behavior. And so um can you give me and our listeners an example, one or two examples of the thoughts that you were thinking in that point of burnout, that now you're like, oh, I started to think this and I'm gonna pay attention to that next time.

SPEAKER_01: 21:49

Um uh I tend to like I'm pretty harsh on myself, like in general. So like if I feel like I'm if I feel that I'm not prepared. Performing or I feel that some like something's off, like historically, I'm just like I just kind of beat myself in a submission. I'm like, you know what, you need to quit being weak, you know, and and maybe you should, you know, what instead of working 16 hours tomorrow, you're gonna work 17, just for even thinking the fact that you were tired. Like, I I tend to, it's it's a you know, I don't know where that came from, but that's just like that's just how I've always done it, and that's not a healthy thing to do for like an extended period of time because you can only beat yourself into into you can only crack the whip on yourself for so long.

SPEAKER_00: 22:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 22:28

Um, you know, I I think one other way to to go about like we talked about finding balance is one solution for things. It's also finding like your happy place. Like what makes you happy? And like, and for you know, and for me, I found boating. And for me, like I used to go out actually. I used to go out ride, I used to like driving. I used to ride a motorcycle until until like COVID hit, and like everybody and their brother moved to Florida, and you know, like he almost died every single time I went on the road. So thank you all to all those New Yorkers that moved down here and forced me to get a boat. Um, I didn't even buy a boat, I have a membership, so it's like it's awesome called Freedom Boat Club. And I can basically show up to any marina and and get a boat anytime, and they just build my gas or build my credit card for gas, and it's peaceful for me. I like being out on the water. There aren't a bunch of people out there. And if I'm feeling like that, I look at my wife, I'm like, I need a boating day, and I'll I'll I'll cancel meetings, or if I have a light meeting day, I'll take a couple of meetings from out there because you know we all have Wi-Fi. And that's it. So, like that for me is my happy place. And so if you find that place, go just make sure you're giving yourself enough time to go to go do that.

SPEAKER_00: 23:32

Which is being kind to yourself, which is valuing yourself above everything else at some point in life. Um, and I I can't help it, friend. But when you I remember when you'd say, Oh yeah, we're on the boat, or hey, I'm on the boat or whatever, and you'd say, Yeah, I go out for peace by myself. All I could think of was Dexter. You know how Dexter goes into the boat and goes into the water by himself. Like, Alex, please don't ever ask me to help you drop a body into the ocean.

SPEAKER_01: 23:58

No, no, it's that's funny though. I don't know if people I I don't and I have no idea how people translate me being on a boat. Like, uh, they're like, I don't know if they think like this guy must have a sweet life and he just like hangs out and does nothing and gets on his boat. But no, it's really just like I work a lot of hours, and sometimes I have to force myself to get out there and be at it where I want to be, and I can work from anywhere that I want to work.

SPEAKER_00: 24:18

Yeah, I love that. Well, we're gonna wrap here quickly. I want to encourage our listeners to be introspective and reflective based on what Alex shared. So think through a moment in your life where you ignored signs of burnout. How can you approach it differently now? What are some ideas that Alex presented today that are triggers or signals to you? Either a team member is struggling, you are struggling. The key here is that if you don't prioritize yourself, no one else will. Don't wait for your manager to ask you, are you approaching burnout or are you maxed out? You have to take accountability for yourself and know how to ask for help. There's no shame in that. And if you don't ask for help and you reach burnout eventually, it's on you. And you got to own that. And so don't go into 2025 if you are feeling burned out, you're approaching burned out, and not take action to help yourself. Because again, you are your best advocate. So, Alex, um, where can people connect with you?

SPEAKER_01: 25:19

Um, connect with me on LinkedIn. That'd be the best place to connect with me, um, you know, professionally. Um, or check me out at pathways for autism.org if you um, you know, are impacted by autism in any way, shape, or form. I'd encourage you to connect with me there.

SPEAKER_00: 25:33

I love that. Um, thank you again for your time, for your wisdom. Um it's always a pleasure. So as we wrap today, um, I just want to encourage people that this podcast is tact, tactical application. Don't walk away and don't take action. Um, find something to do as a result of this if burnout is in your life. So thank you for joining me, and I can't wait for next time. All right, you can pause the recording. That was so good.