Beating Burnout: Maya Sharfi Of Build Yourself On The 5 Things You Should Do If You Are Experiencing Work Burnout
An Interview With Jake Frankel
Find one Opportunity to be Supported and Spoiled
Millions of Americans are returning back to work after being home during the pandemic. While this has been exciting for many, some are feeling burned out by their work. What do you do if you are feeling burned out by your work? How do you reverse it? How can you “get your mojo back”? What can employers do to help their staff reverse burnout?
In this interview series called “Beating Burnout: 5 Things You Should Do If You Are Experiencing Work Burnout,” we are talking to successful business leaders, HR leaders, and mental health leaders who can share insights from their experience about how we can “Beat Burnout.”.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Maya Sharfi.
Maya is founder of Build Yourself, an executive coaching company that helps women make it to senior executive roles and thrive in them — ditching overwork and leading more boldly and impactfully.
Maya’s clients achieve results like spending more time with their kids, moving into new senior executive roles and even achieving $80k and $100k salary bumps. Maya is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, ran a study for the Harvard Business School, and likes to hike, read graphic novels and go to the beach in her free time.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive into the main focus of our interview, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory?
My mom is a single mother and was the sole breadwinner growing up, so I saw the pressure and stress she faced in raising me and my brother. My mom is also a social worker, so I grew up in a household where we talked about our thoughts and feelings. This shaped me deeply, but I didn’t want to ‘talk all day for a living’ like my mother, so I pursued a career in design and got my degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
While I was there, I saw women around me putting themselves down and taking themselves out of the running for their goals, so I launched a workshop for them, which was the start of my coaching company. In the end, I realized that I actually spend most of my time talking for a living, and I absolutely love it!
What or who inspired you to pursue your career? We’d love to hear the story.
Online coaching was a really young industry when I started my practice. But I was a big reader, and reading books like Women Don’t Ask by Sara Laschever and Linda Babcock — which is about how much women leave on the table because they don’t negotiate or ask — lit a fire under me. I felt that there was so much change that could be made by helping women implement the insights from books like this, which led me to found my company.
None of us can achieve success without some help along the way. Was there a particular person who you feel gave you the most help or encouragement to be who you are today? Can you share a story about that?
I grew up poor, so I was fairly risk-averse when it came to my career choices. But deep down inside, I knew I wanted to do big things in my career, and those might require facing risk.
I was debating my next steps after grad school, and I had coffee with one of my professors, Andrea Hansen. She suggested I take the six months before my student loans came due to experiment with pursuing my own interests as a freelancer instead of a stable job.
She helped me feel permission to take the first little risk that put me on the trajectory to running my coaching company today.
Can you share the funniest or most interesting mistake that occurred to you in the course of your career? What lesson or takeaway did you learn from that?
I make mistakes all the time. In fact, just yesterday, I made a mistake in setting up a payment plan — and nobody likes mistakes, especially when it comes to money! But I’ve learned to do two things: Take full responsibility and then let it go. Mistakes happen, and you can still do incredible work, even if you make them.
Can you share your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Why does that resonate with you so much?
It sounds cliché, but Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ slogan. Most of the big breakthroughs I’ve had in my career have come from taking one bold, even a five-minute action. I wouldn’t have my business if I hadn’t pitched the Dean of Students at the Harvard School of Design that we needed a mindset boot camp for women. Moments like that feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m scared to be doing this but I’m going to do it anyway!
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?
I recently updated and relaunched my main coaching program, which helps high-performing women make it to the C-suite and senior leadership positions without overworking or burning out. It’s actually built on an insight: that overworking is a strategy that helps high-achieving women excel in their early careers — but it actually keeps them stuck thereafter. Overworking prevents you from being strategic and influential, rather than doing it all yourself, overworking, and burning out. I love helping women discover that the path of ease is often the best way forward. It’s so counterintuitive to them!
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
As I mentioned, bold action is my secret to making amazing things happen. I was shy growing up, so pushing past my comfort zone to do something bold, such as pitching the Harvard Design School Dean of Students, feels like a challenge — but I know it’s going to grow me.
I’m strategic. I was trained in Human-Centered Design as part of the Harvard Innovation effort, and it helped me see patterns in my clients and spot smarter-not-harder ways forward for them. Just the other day, I outlined a client’s trajectory to senior leadership, and she was thrilled to see the core pieces she was missing — and a whole strategy that made sense laid out for her for the first time.
I’m also a connector. As I mentioned, I grew up with a single mother, but we had a lot of social support — I had ‘aunties’ who had no biological relationship to me but who took care of me, influenced me, and were part of our extended family. So my first thought when I face a challenge is, ‘Who can I connect with who can be an ally on this?’ It also means being proactively generous in business. For instance, when I wanted to attend a conference, I organized a pre-conference book group for others who were interested in it. This allowed us to get acquainted before attending the event together.
For the benefit of our readers, can you briefly let us know why you are an authority on the topic of burnout?
I work with women leaders who want to rise into senior leadership and C-suite positions, and in the work, I found a big obstacle: women were struggling with overwork and overwhelm — both at work and at home.
This kept them, at times, from fully committing to their goal to rise into senior leadership positions, because they (often subconsciously) wondered, ‘If I’m so busy now, how will I ever handle more?’ The mistake they made is to believe that leadership is about more doing rather than more impact.
I also work with many women who are the primary breadwinners in their family or bring home the larger salary. They face all of the breadwinning pressures that men have traditionally shouldered, often without the reprieve of their home responsibilities. Sometimes they find themselves being the breastfeeder and the breadwinner! They often feel alone in their societally untraditional role. All this can lead to stress, burnout, and breakdowns.
This is actually something I experienced personally. After my daughter was born, I felt incredible pressure on my earning abilities, which led to months of burnout and depression. This significantly impacted my revenue and earning potential.
After climbing out of this dark place, I’m passionate about sharing actionable tips to help women — and all individuals — break free from burnout, restore energy, and reignite motivation.
Ok, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview about beating burnout. Let’s begin with a basic definition of terms so that all of us are on the same page. How do you define “Burnout”? Can you explain?
When I burned out, it was like I just stopped. I could still go through the motions, but there wasn’t any life in them. It was hard to find motivation at work. I’d always been someone who could get excited by just about anything, but I found it difficult to get through the day.
I’d been running for years to get to a certain revenue milestone in my business. My core belief was, ‘I just need to get to this revenue level in my career, and then my family will be safe.’ When I didn’t reach my goal before my baby was born, I felt a sense of betrayal. The thought in my mind was, ‘If I couldn’t make this happen, I worked so hard for nothing.’ For the first time in my life, I just gave up.
This is one of the most frightening aspects of burnout. I work with high-performing women, and we’re so used to being energized by getting things done. When you’re struggling with burnout, that energy or motivation is just gone, and you don’t know when it’s coming back. It makes the experience of burnout frightening and disorienting.
How would you define or describe the opposite of burnout?
The opposite of burnout to me isn’t serenity or peacefulness. It’s aliveness! It’s how you feel when you’re solving a problem at work and you lose track of time because you’re just so in it! It’s belly laughs with friends over long dinners, and tickling your kid and realizing your don’t know where the time when because you just feel so alive.
This might be intuitive to you, but it will be instructive to expressly articulate this. Some skeptics may argue that burnout is a minor annoyance and we should just “soldier on’’ and “grin and bear it.” Can you please share a few reasons why burnout can have long-term impacts on our individual health, as well as the health and productivity of our society?
The challenge with burnout is that if you allow it to persist unchecked, it eventually leads to a breakdown. At first, you begin neglecting responsibilities or tasks start slipping through the cracks. Or you might suddenly get sick and find yourself forced to take an extended leave from work. Or suddenly, you reach a point where you simply reach your limit. It’s all too much. You find yourself devoid of energy and passion, unable to summon the drive to engage in anything. It’s as if, overnight, you transition from functioning at maximum capacity to struggling to summon even a fraction of your usual motivation.
From a pure efficiency standpoint, burnout is an incredible waste of resources. It’s like not going to your primary care doctor, and then needing to go in for an emergency multi-thousand dollar surgery.
From your experience, perspective, or research, what are the main causes of burnout?
I see two components to burnout. The first is a belief that drives behavior leading to burnout. For example, women breadwinners have an incredible amount of pressure on them to keep bringing home the paycheck. This can lead them to believe that everything needs to be perfect or it’s all going to fall apart.
Our beliefs that drive burnout often come from childhood programming. For example, I recently had a client who was a woman of color and the child of immigrants. We uncovered a belief that she had to be operating at 200% to succeed.
The second component to burnout is the behaviors that those beliefs drive. The most common ways I see that with the clients I work with are constant success chasing, perfectionism, and people-pleasing.
When you’re chasing success because of an underlying belief that doesn’t serve you, you constantly chase milestones. Excel on this assessment. Secure a spot at that university. Land the promotion. We tell ourselves we’ll be happy on the other side of the goal, but we get there and still feel the same way, so many of us just pick another milestone and conclude that happiness must be on the other side of it. In contrast, we can have career goals fueled by the way we want to think (for example, we want to think more strategically or be more visionary) or the impact we want to make.
Perfectionism is one of the most common ways I see people — especially women — manifest an underlying belief that leads to burnout. If you’re the breadwinner for your family and you carry more of the household responsibilities, you can feel a relentless drive to keep it all together.
I often see my clients express their perfectionism by having standards that are unrealistically high — they focus their attention on controlling things at work that do not move the needle. They can inadvertently micromanage their staff when they don’t produce work that is exactly what they would do, and they can disempower them. This leads them to bring home work that their team should be doing and pull late-night hours.
The third big driver I see to burnout is people-pleasing. If you struggle to say no to others, your belief might be something like this: ‘If I don’t keep them happy, I’ll lose my job.’ People-pleasers also struggle to initiate direct conversations that improve team member performance or eliminate time-wasting office politics.
By the way, we don’t often talk about this, but burnout can be caused not just by overwork, but also by being bored and underchallenged by your work! I actually often see clients who are struggling with being both overworked and bored at the same time. Finding more challenging work so that you aren’t driven by people-pleasing and the need to prove yourself is a way to break through.
What can an individual do if they are feeling burned out by work? How does one reverse it? How can you “get your mojo back?” Can you please share your “5 Things You Should Do If You Are Experiencing Work Burnout?”.
The irony of burnout is that you don’t have the motivation to do anything, which is why I recommend starting with small actions — some of which take only 5 minutes a day — that can start replenishing energy and motivation. Here are my favorites:
- Go on a No Diet
If saying yes to too many things and taking too much on your plate is driving your burnout, go on a ‘no diet.’ Find one thing every day to say no to. I had a client who was struggling to envision her next career goal because she was so busy at work and at home. When I put her on a ‘no diet,’ she realized that she had been offering to create the plans for other people’s projects! She had an underlying belief that she had to prove herself at work and she didn’t realize how much random low-priority work it was causing her to volunteer for until she had to search daily for opportunities to say no. She also started asking for more help from her husband at home. She came to our next session energized by a clear vision of her next career move.
2. Practice 80% Perfection
If you struggle with perfectionism, it’s very hard to stop doing everything at 200% because 200% feels like 100% for you. Here’s what you can do about it: Pick one task or project on your to-do list and ask yourself, ‘What is the 80% perfect version of this?’ Then do that instead.
One of my overworked and burned out clients implemented this practice. She switched companies and felt that she was working at 75%, but her team was amazed by her work. It felt like a risk to work at what she felt was 75%, but by being willing to test it out, she realized how great her non-perfectionist work truly was.
3. Find one Opportunity to be Supported and Spoiled
I had a client who had three kids under 4 years old who told me she was fantasizing about going part-time in her job because it was just too hard to do everything in work and life.
The classic advice is to get help. Get a nanny. Order a food delivery service. Yet some of my clients don’t feel permission to get help because they either have an identity-based belief like, “real moms make dinner from scratch every night,” or they don’t think they can afford it.
An easier way to approach this is to pick one thing that you can test out just once or twice. I suggested my client bring someone in to cook dinner once a week for a few weeks. She could test out how it would feel and let herself be supported just a little bit more.
4. Do Something Bold and New
Most people advise us when we’re feeling burned out to rest, to go to a spa or get a massage. But sometimes burnout is caused by boredom and feeling stuck. One of the ways to break through is counterintuitively to do something totally different. It doesn’t have to be time-consuming. It might be getting a babysitter and going out to a karaoke night and pushing yourself to get on stage and sing. It might be taking off an afternoon to take one of your kids to a carnival. It’s about changing things up to get a new perspective and new energy.
I had a defeating month at work where nothing was seeming to go right. I decided one day to wear my candy-colored bejeweled bustier to work. No one could see it on my zoom screen, but my energy shifted, and all of a sudden, I saw clients have massive breakthroughs in their sessions. Clients who had been sitting on the fence about working with me suddenly started saying yes.
5. Go to Therapy or Coaching to Find your Core Belief Driving Burnout
A good therapist or coach can help you identify the core beliefs that are keeping you stuck in burnout. When I was struggling with burnout and depression, my therapist helped me see my cycle of pushing myself really hard for an outcome I wanted. Whether it was launching the new program or the big push of getting my revenue and business on autopilot before having kids, I was driven by a belief that if I worked extra hard now, I’d get to have what I want (and be safe) later.
Once I accepted that I could not fully control things and prevent all future pain, I could redefine how I wanted to think about my work. If I couldn’t control all my outcomes, I could choose to focus instead on how I wanted to feel in my work — which was creative, connected, and inspired. I was able to have so much more fun in my work. What’s funny is that when I approached my work this way with this new energy, I also increased my income.
What can concerned friends, colleagues, and life partners do to help someone they care about reverse burnout?
The people in our lives can give us permission to stop engaging in the actions that drive burnout and to do things differently. My husband had my back the entire time. He challenged my beliefs. He said, ‘If we don’t end up having the money to afford everything we think we are supposed to have for our daughter, that’s ok. All of those things are not worth her mother feeling like you feel.’
That was one of those massive paradigm-shifting moments for me that helped release me from everything I’d been doing that led to my stress and burnout.
What can employers do to help their staff reverse burnout?
One of the most powerful things companies can do to prevent and heal from cultures of burnout, is to encourage staff of all levels to be more strategic with their time and resources. We can all be encouraged to ask what’s working to drive our results, and where there is fluff and busywork that doesn’t move the needle. Sometimes that means eliminating projects. Sometimes that’s setting boundaries with clients and protecting the team.
The other thing companies can do is to have flexible work arrangements. Companies that have autonomy, but also have results-based cultures are electrifying to work at.
These ideas are wonderful, but sadly they are not yet commonplace. What strategies would you suggest to raise awareness about the importance of supporting the mental wellness of employees?
The biggest change we need to make is for leaders to model using these strategies. That means sometimes saying no to the client or pushing back on that unstrategic project handed down from on-high. It means taking vacation and using the flex time policy ourselves. Some companies have these policies in place, but when high performers see that leaders don’t take advantage of them, they conclude that people who get ahead in this company don’t partake of the flextime policy. So then your high performers work and work… until they burn out.
What are a few of the most common mistakes you have seen people make when they try to reverse burnout in themselves or others? What can they do to avoid those mistakes?
As a high performer, when I first experienced burnout, I tried to do ‘all the things’ to fix it. I tried to rest more, I took time off. I went to the beach and made time for self care. But I did it all like I did everything else — aggressively checking self-care items off my to do list.
It didn’t help. What ultimately helped was to take small actions to change my energy, and to identify and rewrite the core belief that had driven my burnout.
Ok, we are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I am fortunate to feel like I am building a movement in what I do every day. I love helping high-performing women work less hard and often see bigger impacts as a result.
Originally, I named my career growth program ‘The Lazy Leader Lab’ because I deeply believe that if high-performing women can experience what they perceive as ‘laziness’ in their work and life (which usually equals everyone else’s A+ effort), they can avoid burning out. They can unleash their true creativity, capacity, and ability to experience joy and make an impact.
My sales coach eventually convinced me that ‘The Lazy Leader Lab’ didn’t resonate with the high-achieving women clients I love working with, so I did change the name. However, the manifesto behind my work remains the same.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we both tag them :-)
I once got to see Angela Glover Blackwell, the former Executive Director of PolicyLink speak. She has a way of holding space with a lot of personal power, but in a way that makes everyone else also feel more powerful. It was profound and inspiring.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I’m most active on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mayasharfi/. People can also visit my website at buildyourselfworkshop.com and even download a set of scripts for saying no more often here.
Thank you for these really excellent insights, and we greatly appreciate the time you spent with this. We wish you continued success and good health!
