Burnout Reset: 3 Steps to Build Resilience with Focusologist, Penny Zenker
Have you felt burnt out, as if you were simply going through the motions? Perhaps you're experiencing challenges in your life and would like clarity on what to do next. In this episode, Focusologist and TEDx speaker, Penny Zenker shares her 3-step process to overcome challenges and build resilience.
After this Episode, You Will Be Able to:
Incorporate 'reset moments' into your daily routine
3-Step reset practice to overcome burnout
Seize new career opportunities
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About the guest:
Penny Zenker is The Focusologist, CSP, international motivational speaker, business strategy coach, and best-selling author. Penny founded, developed, and sold her first multi-million dollar business while living in Zurich, Switzerland. Later at the world’s 4th largest Market Research company, she managed business unit turnarounds and was a Tony Robbins business coach helping entrepreneurs around the world to double their businesses.
Penny is the bestselling author of The Productivity Zone: Stop the Tug of War with Time. As a master NLP practitioner and neuro-strategist, she integrates the elements of thought, communication, and behavior to provide strategies for positive changes and maximum results.
Penny’s expertise focuses on strategic thinking, leadership, problem-solving, communication, and productivity. She has coached hundreds of successful business leaders and entrepreneurs in leadership roles, relationships, and building culture.
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Overcome roadblocks and obstacles
So it was 2008 and it started the year with me being invited by my husband after being married for 16 years for a divorce. My kids were only one and three at the time.
My whole world was turned upside down. I didn't see it coming. And then we still have to work, we still have to show up every day. And so in the process of me doing my best to compartmentalize things, I was working on the executive team at this market research company and the division that I was running headquarters had made a deal with a competitor and had traded it, and the whole executive team was going to lose their jobs as a result of that. And we had to implement it.
And then just at that same time, when I found out I was gonna be losing my job in a couple of months, we found out we were invested with Bernie Madoff, which was a Ponzi scheme. And so, the savings that we had were completely wiped out.
So, needless to say, I've never had a time in my life that was so crazy emotional that required me at each turn to look for whatever grit.
I can imagine it was probably very demotivating when you're told to implement a particular project, knowing that you've been let go, that the jobs are being eliminated, and on top of that, everything that was going on in your personal life, it's really hard to show up as your best self.
It feels like your life is sometimes crumbling in those moments and you just feel like crawling into a little ball and staying there and hoping that nobody needs anything from you.
What steps did you take to overcome these challenges that you experienced?
I relied on reset moments.
These moments are available to us every day. We can take them. We don't have to wait until the big burnouts or the breakdowns to get that. So, that's what I did. And I would just take more moments to stop and what I say in this is what triggers a reset moment is a three-step reset practice.
And that's very simple to get to step back, step back away from the emotion, from the bias, and the way that you're looking at things, try to become a little bit more objective. And there have been many times where you also have to let yourself feel it, but then you have to say, okay, what's going on?
Get yourself back into an emotionally controlled place. So step back is number one.
Step two is to get perspective. I could easily get triggered by my ex and some of the things that happening in this situation or triggered at work with something that I'm doing in the implementation that seems fruitless or things that I can't share with people.
But in those moments, that's when I need to get perspective. What am I working towards and what are my options here? What's my best choice, my best way forward, right?
This is how we can choose to focus on what matters most to get that perspective. And then the last thing that I did in the third item was to realign, now that I've gotten some perspective, maybe I was heading down the wrong path.
Let me realign with what's best for.
Take a step back. Remove our own emotions for a second. Approach it objectively.
Resetting can be a time management strategy to direct our priorities, but it can also be that leadership strategy to help delegate effectively and give people more autonomy and direction.
It can be an innovation strategy so that we open up to new ways of doing things, and new voices.
Build reset moments
So maybe the first thing that you do when you get up in the morning is we have these practices by the way that we already are doing. So how do we take more advantage of them and how do we build a few more in? So maybe somebody already wakes up in the morning and goes for a walk.
Maybe as you go for a walk, you could set an intention for the day and how you want to show up that can amplify that reset moment that you're already taking. And maybe you've got into a habit where you're working through lunch. And, you're not taking reset moments that you need to.
If you are planning meetings, it's time to reduce the time of meetings back to back. Meetings are killing us, and it's also preventing us from resetting, from thinking, from closing down one topic and into another. So we cut it so close that we could do our meetings in 45 minutes and give everybody the advantage of 15 minutes to reset in that period.
So like you said, somebody says something odd and they snap at you. It's an opportunity for a situational reset moment for you to think about, okay, this isn't personal. So before you respond, you can recognize, oh, this person's not normally like this, right? And it can happen in a split second.
I'm certainly not saying that it's all on the organization, but I'm suggesting that both sides, organizations can do more to support their people in recognizing those little things, like you said, of stopping emails or coming up with some common language and common response times and things like that to give people, uh, a break and to set appropriate expectations.
Take what we can control from our perspective and our actions, and then encourage the organization to do that as well.
