Dave Braun
00:00:05
Hello folks. Welcome to the HireMyVA Team and Business Building Podcast brought to you by Yoogozi.com. In this podcast and at HireMyVA, we help you to reclaim your freedom through hiring and thriving with virtual assistants without breaking the bank – and that means your bank. And I’ve got that memorized by now, Larry?
Larry Broughton
00:00:22
Very impressive.
Dave Braun
00:00:23
Yeah, I should, after all these episodes. But if folks I’m Dave Braun and as you already heard, I got Larry Broughton on the call with me today. We’re recording another podcast episode where we are helping folks learn and ourselves about team and business building and life.
Larry Broughton
00:00:43
Hello, handsome, Dave.
Dave Braun
00:00:45
Hey, how are you, man?
Larry Broughton
00:00:46
Good. And I think that your last point was a good one and that we’re learning along the way as well. We’re students of business, we’re students of life. And I kind of describe us that we are aggregators of information. Just sharing the good news about what we learned. So this is really part three of what was supposed to be a part, two part series. You know, Dave, you talk so much.
Dave Braun
00:01:15
Oh my gosh. Yeah. The words are just flying outta me today.
Larry Broughton
00:01:19
So we’re really trying to talk about how do you avoid burnout and what do you do a burnout happens, especially while we’re working. Did you say, say that this is actually episode 131, Did you already say that?
Dave Braun
00:01:31
I think so, I have.
Larry Broughton
00:01:32
No. Could they, I don’t listen to you on these things. I just, what, I’m sorry,
Dave Braun
00:01:38
What did you say? Something?
Larry Broughton
00:01:40
No, this I think is an important one because as you and I look around to our clients, we look around in the business arena. There are a lot of variable is that are just sucking the life blood. Oh my gosh. For a lot of people. Right? And so what we’re talking about is how do we avoid burnout? And if burnout is in your life, what can you do? But before we do that, we really need to say, what is burnout and it’s really simple. Really burnout is just this form of exhaustion that’s caused by a continual feeling of being and over overwhelmed. It’s a result of this extreme enduring, ongoing, and that’s key ongoing, emotional, physical, and mental stress. It’s often, but not always related to our jobs, to our careers. And it creeps in when we’re overwhelmed, when we’re emotionally drained. So let’s say you’ve had a loss with a family member or something like that, or when we’re unable to keep up with just our daily incessant demands of life. So that’s burnout. You probably all felt it before. So now what, right. That’s the question now what?
Dave Braun
00:02:50
Well, and one other aspect I don’t think we’ve talked about yet was there’s, you know, there’s external events that happen to us that will cause us to, or contibute to us feeling that burnout. But a lot of times, especially for entrepreneurs, it’s self induced because we may be thinking, oh my gosh, there’s this opportunity out there. There’s that opportunity. There’s, there’s another opportunity. There’s so many opportunities and they can both be, or they can all be good for us and help us make money or be significant. But if we’re doing too much, no matter how good it is, it’s easy to get burned out.
Larry Broughton
00:03:28
Well, and often it’s self induced by our own shortcomings. I’m the only one who, who can do this. No one is as good as I am. Exactly. I don’t trust people, you know, I’m seeking perfection – unrealistic. Yes. All of those are unrealistic and frankly not true.
Dave Braun
00:03:46
Yep. And that’s one of the reasons why we’ve created HireMyVA. We have this program, we have, you know, the course we can get VAs for you. We, we have, you know, these Virtual Spotlight sessions, which are powerful in themselves to help people will avoid that burnout because you gotta have other people around you. That’s one things that we talked about and some of our other episodes, right?
Larry Broughton
00:04:09
Yeah. And we could beat people up all day long Dave, about this. But we probably in the first two parts of this, we’ve probably given 25 different elements about this, but it kind of does to lead into, and you’ve already kind of set up what I was thinking. The next one for me is that we have to be aware of just these environmental factors that plague us every day in our lives can lead to burnout. You know, like this damn pandemic that hopefully we’re on, on the end of right now. And I’m not gonna say the word, cause I don’t want this video to be taken down or it might be a geopolitical worry that that’s plugging us. It might be if you live in a part of the world or part of the country where there’s constant rain or the winter months where you’re not getting enough vitamin D in your system, these are environmental things that can have an impact on our mood and kind of can lead to burnout.
Larry Broughton
00:05:06
So you have to lift your head up and survey the battlefield sometimes to say, okay, what’s really causing this. Cause I’ve been in these seasons of burnout, Dave, where you just start feeling sorry for yourself and it feels good to be in that dark side. Sorry, just, just being honest with you, right? But we do have to have the discipline and thank goodness I’ve got people like you in my life who sometimes have to, for verbally grab you by the shoulders and say, come on. You know, it’s not that bad or are like, who really hold me accountable on it. So hopefully we’ve got people in your life, my listeners, my friends who are at asking the same questions, but I don’t think we can underestimate the impact that whether geopolitical stuff has on our lives.
Dave Braun
00:05:57
Yeah. And I think we may have talked about this in the first episode. I can’t remember cuz like you said, I talked too much.
Larry Broughton
00:06:03
I didn’t said it.
Dave Braun
00:06:06
I know one of, one of the key points is that you may laugh off, oh the weather or I live in Southern California, it’s sunny or you know, whatever environ and it is, you may laugh that off, but it can only take one little thing that puts you up over the edge where you’re like ready to just hang it all over up. Right? You could have all these other things that we talk about that gets you to the 95% burnout. But you get one thing that puts you over the edge and then you’re in trouble and maybe environment could be that. It could be that.
Larry Broughton
00:06:42
Well this is why it’s important. Like in the last episode we talked about, you have to know your breaking point and that only comes from experience and from a level of maturity. And so you have to start dealing with burnout before you get to the tipping point. As soon as that low bull oil starts to happen, you need to start dealing with this cuz you never know like who the hell knew that we were gonna be closing down the country two years ago. In addition to somebody serving you with divorce papers, in addition to your senior vice president of sales and marketing, going to work for somebody else and taking your business. Yeah. That’s gonna have to make anyone’s had blow up.
Dave Braun
00:07:20
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, this reminds me of what we talked about a little bit in, in the last episode, I wanna take a different take on it where we, one of the great things you can do to avoid burnout is to schedule vacations and then of course, to take ’em, but actually to do them right. Make yourself do it, come up with systems in order to do that. And it’s related– let me tell you a story about somebody in our past mastermind group that I’m in, you know, they were feeling this burnout big time, but that was because they enjoyed going on vacations in an RV and they couldn’t do that during the pandemic. Yeah. Once they were starting to do that again, then they were feeling much better. So they were able to hang in there through some of that crazy environment time, but they actually ended up scheduling their vacations and you’ve gotta actually, as an entrepreneur, Larry and business owners, we could, if we wanted to work, you know, 24/7, but we’ve got to schedule these things. We have to have that discipline to do that.
Larry Broughton
00:08:28
Well, listen, we do need to be obsessed with the success of our business, right? Yes. There has to be that healthy level of obsession for sure. But the reason that bond is so humorous, the way you said it is you like put emphasis on both scheduling vacations and taking them. I am huge at talking about vacations. In fact, I’m very, pretty good about scheduling vacations, but actually taking them, that’s a different story. I find plenty of reasons to postpone them or whatever. So I, I find that pretty humorous guilty as charged, I guess is what I should probably just say with that one.
Dave Braun
00:09:07
Well, I think there’s a great thing that you and I can do is, you know, we go to different conferences and do some speaking in programs and presentations. Great thing you can do is tack a couple of days at the end of that to hang out, see the area- that kinda a thing.
Larry Broughton
00:09:25
Yeah. And in fact, thank you for saying that. That’s exactly what I’m doing on this next trip that you and I are going on. I can’t remember the last time I did that, but I’m staying for two extra days andyou’re flying back, I’m sorry, Dave, you’re gonna have to fly back by yourself. No one to hold your hand on this one.
Dave Braun
00:09:41
Oh no!
Larry Broughton
00:09:42
I know I have to befriend a stranger, but yeah, I’m staying for two extra days just to visit friends that are in the city where we’re going to be. I think that’s a really, really good one as a reminder.
Dave Braun
00:09:56
You know that,
Larry Broughton
00:09:56
But it did. Go ahead.
Dave Braun
00:09:57
I’m sorry. I was gonna say that one that we’re going to, I suppose we could talk about it if leave it up to you, but that one that we’re going to in June, I’m gonna, we’re gonna, Cheryl’s gonna hopefully fly and meet me there and then we’ll stay for a few extra days.
Larry Broughton
01:10:11
I was talking about the one in April, but yes. Yeah.
Dave Braun
01:10:13
This other one in June. Yeah.
Larry Broughton
01:10:15
I’m good. That’s I’m glad you guys are doing that. That’s awesome. Yeah, but it kind of reminds me though, this is why I’ve got our office manager, my assistant, really she’s great at reminding me of these things. And if I didn’t have someone like her in my life, or we didn’t have Daphne on the team who can do the task help as we call it by having a team around me, holy smokes, Dave, my head would explode, but delegation is really one of the key things that can help us avoid burnout. Or if you’re in burnout to alleviate some of the pressure, we have to be able to hand things off to somebody. We referred to the three column exercise earlier that’s part of the HireMyVA and the Victory Program, as well as the delegation defer, you know, delete, delegate, defer due, thing that we’ve got. Do not subscribe or do not get seduced by the thing like no one can do it as good as me. That type of thing, no one else can do it. That’s the death of growth, both personal, professional, spiritual, mental, you know, you have to become a student in life and be willing to delegate and defer things to someone else.
Dave Braun
01:11:38
Yeah, absolutely. And fact, what you can do is you can, if you have, you know, like Melissa on your team, Daph on our team as well. We can also ask them to keep us a little bit accountable to help remind us that, Hey, we may be working too much because we’ve gotta create some good boundaries between our life and work, whatever those are. Like we talked about working 24/7, that’s not healthy and yes, we should be assessed with our business, but we should be obsessed for the long term health ourselves and our business. Both of them. Yeah. And if you get burned out, how is that gonna help your business?
Larry Broughton
01:12:19
Yeah. I love that you use the word boundaries because you know, we hear oftentimes Dave and there’s been books written on this about work-life balance. My friends, there is no such thing as work life balance- it’s just not gonna be there. Balance means being equal. And you’re just not gonna be able to have all things be equal, but setting appropriate boundaries is really good. And you’ve done, I think of everyone I know you’re kind of the best that I know at doing this. You schedule specific times. Don’t bother me during this time. Cause I’m doing this, you know, you’ve got your focused work time, all your calendar. Sadly, I still at my advanced stage still am not very good at this. And so there is the assumption, Larry has a hole in his calendar that I can go ahead and book a meeting and, or, you know what I mean? I have to get better at saying, Hey, this is gonna do not disturbed time. I may not be having a meeting, but I’m working on something during this, that appropriate boundary.
Dave Braun
01:13:16
Yes, absolutely.
Larry Broughton
01:13:17
Boundaries mean nothing if they’re not enforced though.
Dave Braun
01:13:23
And your, and your team can help you enforce them if you let them and give them permission.
Larry Broughton
01:13:27
Well, it’s the same thing about protecting our time with ourselves and with the people on our team. We also have to do the same thing with these nagging clients that we have. I can think of a couple times in my professional life, Dave, where it’s been like, I wanna pull my hair out or I avoid going into work or I avoid certain meetings because there are, was, twice in my career that I can think of pretty easily where these just nagging clients who like, no matter what we did it wasn’t good enough. And when I would have conversations with them, with them, sorry, that was my New York accent starting to come out is, oh no, we love you guys but they turn right around afterwards and are bad mouthing team members, it’s like, it was in their DNA to be negative, to wine, complain.
Larry Broughton
01:14:17
And their philosophy was well, that’s how you inspire or, or that’s how you motivate someone is to be a nag. And you know, catch us doing something wrong instead of catch us doing something right. I just don’t do that anymore. Because when you have to remember the 80/20 principle, right. They really, 20% of our clients are generating 80% of the revenue. But there is the bottom, there is the flip side of that. 20% of the negative people are consuming 80% of our time or providing 80% of the headaches. So it kind of goes back to what we were just talking about boundaries. Set boundaries to the type of people and clients you’re gonna have in your life.
Dave Braun
01:15:01
Mm
Larry Broughton
01:15:04
Uhoh. Uhoh you’re scrambling for something.
Dave Braun
01:15:07
I have another mug. Nathan Ingram says this-“Good fences make great clients.”
Larry Broughton
01:15:12
Good fences make great clients.
Larry Broughton
01:15:15
That’s so true. That’s a good one. Good fences make great clients. I do like that. I do like that.
Dave Braun
01:15:24
You know, it’s funny, I’ve got these mugs here and I don’t, I never drink outta ’em. I use ’em for pencil and pin holders, but they’ve got cool things on ’em.
Larry Broughton
01:15:31
Yeah. Well you’ve got your water bottles. Yes, that’s right.
Dave Braun
01:15:34
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
01:15:36
Well, you know, Dave, I don’t know if you got anymore, but I think we’re about, I’m kind of wrapping up in my head. I think we’ve got over these last three episodes, a lot of ’em but you used to call, there was I forget who talked about habit stacking.
Dave Braun
01:15:50
Yeah. It was actually, my financial advisor is, has kind of coin that term and I’m like, that makes so, so much sense.
Larry Broughton
01:15:59
Yeah. So I was thinking about this at one way is say like, if you’re doing your exercise routine, like yoga or meditation, those kind of things, I think it’s really important. The mindfulness I can’t underestimate. And I know listen used to think this was a bunch of nonsense as well, this, you know, the mindfulness meditation stuff, but, and frankly, I remember being surprised when you first got into yoga years ago. And now you preach the yoga thing all the time, the physical and the mental benefits that you get from that.
Dave Braun
01:16:38
Yeah. I’ve changed a little bit and I’ll tell you why on that. Because I realized the other day is that, you know, the, the yoga and the hold on a sec, the yoga and the mindfulness clearing your mind that was really helpful. But one of the things I found Larry that I was missing was I wasn’t learning like I used to. And so I thought to myself, let me try this. So I’ve really got my own routines that I go through. That I’ve got mentally stored. And then I listen to podcasts or an audio book while I’m exercising. And like, I was just listening to another book and as I was working out, I’d stop and write down a bunch of notes that I’m showing on the screen here of different things.
Dave Braun
01:17:35
And so what I’m finding is for me, at this point is, and I probably should go back to doing a real yoga routine. But I’m finding, I’m combining the physical with the mental, the learning, one of my strengths, like we talked about before is learning. And so I’m doing both of those things together in the morning and it just fuels almost every day. That along with one of the habits that we’ve talked about is having, like, I think you and I do smoothies, we take care of ourselves physically. I mean, we do some of those things in the morning as the basis of our day. And it gives us a lot more, I don’t know, cushion in our day to be able to handle some of the, maybe it’s a better word is resiliency. It gives us more resiliency, be able to handle things that come out through the day and to be able to handle the fact that, oh man, by the end of the day, I’m feeling burned out, but you get a good night’s rest. We talked about sleep and then some exercise in the morning, or whenever you do it along with feeding your strengths, that can really keep you from getting over the edge, it really can. And that, I mean there, and then there’s another thing too, is when we’re doing these podcasts, it’s always reminding me of, I mean, it’s always helping to improve me as we talk about these things. Cause I learn a bunch of stuff from you and some of it’s also just thanks for the reminder- TFTR.
Larry Broughton
01:18:59
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, Dave, we’ve probably, I try to wrap this thing up by my mental count, I mean, there’s gotta be over 25 different things that we, you just listed.
Dave Braun
01:19:11
Yeah. and maybe folks you’ve listened, you’ve hung with us through these three episodes. Maybe what you can do is review them, go back and listen again. But the ones that we’ve mentioned recently, maybe there’s one or two things that you can adopt. I mean, there’s a bunch of ’em like Larry said maybe 25 things, but maybe just one or two things that you can adopt that will give you the ability to be more resilient, to be able to take that edge where you’re at that burnout point and bring it down, bring it down just a little bit.
Larry Broughton
01:19:49
Yeah. Because the answer isn’t always change careers, get a divorce, move to a new state. Although you feel like it sometimes, you know, run away from my family. If you can just take the pressure off a little bit, you can start thinking a little bit more clearly. So I love that idea, Dave, of picking two or three things and release the pressure of valve a little bit so you can think about this.
Dave Braun
02:20:18
So what would you say Larry, for you personally, what do you think would be those ones, maybe the top two or three or one that causes you to, you know, cuz you’ve had so much stress given stuff going on in your business and Ben, in your life, plus some things you’re, you’ve been dealing with physically, you’ve had so many things. How are you able to cope with those? Maybe some of these ones we talked about the 25, is there one, two or three of ’em that really have helped ypu?
Larry Broughton
02:20:49
Yeah. I feel like I’ve turned the corner a little bit for those who don’t know as we’re recording this, we are in what end of the first quarter, 2022. So we’ve been in the pandemic for over two years at this point. My business was basically almost completely shut down, furloughed 67% of our team members, sold hotels, lost contracts so that’s been very tough. Trying to grow the business at the same time, been very difficult. My son was killed in a car accident a couple of months ago, I’ve had some health issues. There there’s been a lot, Dave. So to me, what I’m learning in the last couple of weeks is things feel like they’re starting to turn is I’ve been forcing myself to get more sleep. I’ve been pursuing this spiritual thing that you and I talked about earlier. I’ve been journaling a lot more and therapy has been really helpful as well to get an outside perspective on things. That’s what’s helping me and yeah, those are the top few that have helped me on the burnout thing. There’s probably more, but you asked for two or three, three. Yeah. How about you?
Dave Braun
02:22:09
Yeah, I would say that, I talked about before like my morning routine. Combining the, you know, the physical with the learning plus in the morning, another habit stacking is I read, you know, my Bible on my phone and I journal in this Bible app on my phone while I’m actually walking outside.
Larry Broughton
02:22:29
Yeah. By the way, I should add that in there as well. Last two weeks, I have gotten back into the physical and I do the same thing as far as I’m listening to a book while I’m out walking. So that’s that’s helped or a good podcast.
Dave Braun
02:22:46
Yeah. Those are really helpful. And I think one of the top things we talked about a little bit at, it was at the very beginning of the episode one was having a group of friends where you know that you can actually go and talk to them on a regular basis and get that crap that’s inside of you out.
Larry Broughton
02:23:05
Well, by the way, that’s these group of friends have to be non judge mental. Right. I was so nervous to bring some things up to you guys last week cause you’re a little bit crazy wacky outside.
Dave Braun
02:23:19
Yeah.
Larry Broughton
02:23:20
You know, mainstream thinking and you guys are all like, dude, this is why we’re here. Right. And I know that you left there rolling your eyes at me, but you guys were very supportive.
Dave Braun
02:23:34
Well, well it’s, I think you’ve term it better than anybody else is that there’s all this other, you know, there’s okay. Maybe a rolling in the eyes or whatever or disagreement, but overarching all of that is an agape love that we have for each other and the unconditional love, that we’re gonna love each other, no matter what each of us does.
Larry Broughton
02:23:55
That’s right. Yeah. That’s good.
Dave Braun
02:23:56
And that, just knowing you have a group of folks like that is gives you a lot of re resiliency.
Larry Broughton
02:24:02
For sure. It really does.
Dave Braun
02:24:03
Yeah, it does. So that would one of the top things too.
Larry Broughton
02:24:06
Yeah. Agreed. Well, good. We should wrap this one up, man. This is our first three-parter and there’s been a lot of stuff in here.
Dave Braun
02:24:14
Okay. Well let’s do that. Well, thanks everybody again for being with us, listening to our talk about avoiding burnout. We hope you can take a couple of these things and really them and to give yourself some resiliency, even if you’re not there at burnout yet, there’s gonna be times when you may approach it. So I think it’s really good for you guys to just take one or two of these things. One of the top ways to do that also is by building a team- having folks around you that can take some of the pressure off. And that’s one of the things we do at HireMyVa, we help you to build a team, to get you to reclaim your freedom. With our Course and Community and our White Glove Service. In our White Glove Service, we find a rockstar VA for you. And we’d love for you to do a couple of things for us right now, subscribe to the podcast.
Dave Braun
02:25:02
If you haven’t already done. So subscribe on YouTube for us so you can get reminders. Give us a rating. Good rating. Hopefully put a comment on YouTube. Let us know, you know how you’re avoiding burnout. If you’re on the edge, we’ll be suggesting some things to you. We’d love to have a conversation with you. And then of course go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our Course and Community, our White Glove Service. You can get some of the transcriptions from these podcasts and go through them pretty quick. Or you can listen to us again andd, and again, if you want, that’s a great way to do it too. But remember, even without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for hire and thrive with virtual assistants. We’re helping a lot of folks, we want to help you too. So just go to Hiremyva.com for more information.
Larry Broughton
02:25:52
That’s right, folks. And we’ll see you on the next time or the next one, I guess. God bless you. God keep you, God hold of you. Go get ’em. We’ll see you later. Bye.
Dave Braun
02:26:00
Okay, bye.
