Crushing It Without Crushing Yourself (the Polymathic Way)
Grace Ng, shares her thoughts on burn out, as a result of having her hands full. Sometimes, we all suffer from this. The key to consider is the emphasis around polymathic tendencies and how to balance curiosity with expectation…Prioritising what matters
Grace Ng’s Takeaways:
Burnout is seductively easy to slip into.
As a business owner, a key step is to create the time & space to recover
To do this, you need to sharpen your focus and only do the important (Eisenhower 1s and 2s)
A few days ago, I published a late-night confession on LinkedIn: I was burning out.
The first thought was, I should know better. The second was, who else is suffering?
You see, I’m a medical doctor and an ex-CEO who had led (and grew) a 300 person dental organisation through COVID. After becoming a mum, I became a high-growth business coach to give me more time with the kids whilst keeping my head in the game.
I have nothing to complain about, and in fact, things could be seen as going swimmingly. My clients are growing fabulously. My brain health clinic is treating its first patients and my startups (investments and advisory) are finding their feet. One even was nominated for the AFR Fast Starters List. I recently had twins (currently six months) and have so much more support now than when I was in the pandemic with my first child.
But I was burning out.
In 2019, the WHO added “burnout” to its official compendium of diseases, the International Disease Classification (ICD-11). Burnout is described as:
Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion.
Increased mental distance, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job.
Reduced professional efficacy.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
I recognised it in myself, because I’d been here before but never as a business owner, with a team and a family looking to me on what to do. My whole life I’ve taken big bites out of life, loaded up the plates and headed back for more.
What to do about eliminating burnout (focus on the business owner hat)
Reading widely, I agree with psychotherapist Natacha Duke, MA, RP, of the Cleveland Clinic, who said there’s many a cause — not just occupational — for burnout and that the first steps are to identify what is causing that feeling and how badly?
But as a business owner, or leader, when you’re at the centre of it all, I’d argue the first critical step for your business is for you to create the time to recover: sleep, exercise, reconnect with your community and support network. And we do this by limiting our focus: focusing only on what is Important (Eisenhower Quadrant 1s and 2s*). And in the state of burnout, that’s going to feel like even more effort.
*If you want to learn more about what I’m talking about, message me or watch this summary from my buddy Michael Knight at Best Book Bits. Or join our workshop in January.
I promise you it is worth the energy trying to fix your focus. You’ll gain so much psychological relief from realising not everything is absolutely critical.
Here would be the time to trot out some trite tropism about it’s not all on you, the Pareto Principle or the importance of Pomodoro timers. I’m not speaking to that audience. I’m speaking to the people who is over the theatre of innovation and for whom ordinary is not enough. But they would still like to survive, thrive and be mentally stronger whilst crushing it.
We ran a brief workshop on Friday and Monday, with an objective of SPANXing our year (by sharpening our focus). Entrepreneurs from UK and Australia tuned in to work on identifying their Important items and assign it to less time than they would normally assign things to be done (Parkinson’s Law). Scheduling things that had been niggling at them, intuitively, as they are Important. Like, Eisenhower 1 and 2 important — but in a way that they still get time off across the holiday season, and their team is inspired to work right up until the Friday before the holiday period.
Why? Every business leader has a sense of the things that are Important — regardless of Urgency — and it’s the ones that are Important but not Urgent (Eisenhower 2s) that tend to get kicked down the road. BUT that’s where they can explode and become Eisenhower Quadrant 1s (Important AND Urgent). What does this look like? A calendar filled with “Quadrant 1s” is a day of running around fire fighting. You feel important, but you also feel dirty and exhausted and have a disquieting thought that you have no energy for “regular life” or critical work — ie for Eisenhower Quadrant 2s.
(Any one who wants this to be different for them, who wants to stop firefighting, leave a comment “5x5” below and I’ll get our magical 5x5 grid out to you)
Stephen Covey, the author who introduced me to the Eisenhower Matrix concept in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, reflected “most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important”. It’s Quadrant 2 tasks that move the company forward. And anyone who has done a ludicrous revenue-first or growth-at-all-cost annual plan knows that without solving for Quadrant 2 tasks (eg code rewrites, service redesigns, shipping upgrades), you can trip up even the fastest growing startups — because the foundation for growth isn’t there.
Quadrant 2 tasks are often about efficiency and system improvements. Making things better.
Also, what is a Quadrant 2 task for your business (as a fast-growth startup) may not be the same as for a business (or business person) of 20 years. So, it may unintentionally mislead you for someone to say, “oh, professional networking is a Quadrant 2 task” (it’s important, but not urgent). It depends. What does your business need right now? What’s on your timeline? Are you raising in the next three months? Is the networking part of securing your corporate deal?
Next, I like the big rocks concept to determine priority. Adapted from the Dan Sullivan R-Factor question, you can identify the critical elements for your success in the next three years, then use that priority to set importance of the Quadrant 2 tasks.
And then, finally, why apply the 5x5? Because people can only focus on a certain number of things. Again, planning is not just for you as the business leader. It’s for the team to understand how to coordinate efforts and hit a goal.
Want more?
In my next article, I’m going to expound on my stance of “The Annual Plan is Not for You”: it is actually about communicating to your team — so, it is not “dumb”. Yes, it’s often done poorly — and at the wrong periods in the year. There are the perfect times to do it, including Oct / Nov (December is a bit of pinch — I’d wait till January).
There you have it — some pearls of wisdom from one of our resident polymaths, and how she plans to tackle and help others burn-out…
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