Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here, where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up you guys, and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host Britt Seva, and today we’re going to talk about the anti burnout plan. Sounds good, right?
This is going to be one of those episodes you can come back to from time to time, have a date with it when you need to. Hopefully not too often.
When I was going to do this episode, it’s because I’ve recovered from burnout twice in the last probably about 7 months. This is a little bit of a personal one for me because I wanted to really understand why burnout happens and how we can gain better control of making sure it doesn’t happen again.
For me, whenever I experience pain or whenever I see anybody else experiencing pain, I always say we have two options. We can put a band-aid on it and take an Advil and it’ll give us relief for now. Or we can go back and find the source of the issue and ensure it doesn’t happen again.
I’ve got plenty of Advil and I’ve got plenty of band-aids. I’ve got two kids. Believe me, I need both on hand. I can keep giving you Advil and I can keep giving you bandaids and we can control the pain. I can show you how to control the pain. It’s easy. It doesn’t take much effort.
What takes a lot of effort is going back to the root of the issue and start asking ourselves, why do you always trip on the bottom stair and scrape up your elbow? You’ve done it six times. Should we change the step? Should we change the way you walk? Do you need to wear different shoes when you’re going up and down the stairs because you’ve fallen on the same stairs six times. The likelihood of you falling a seventh time is pretty high if we don’t do anything to change the situation and the reality.
Yet most of us put on the same pair of shoes, walk up the same staircase, and are surprised when we fall the seventh, eighth, ninth time. We get the same box of band-aids and pop the same Advil and say, well, I feel better now. Hopefully it doesn’t happen again.
Instead of doing that cycle, this episode is about breaking the cycle and helping you to find a better pair of shoes to walk the stairs with. I want to give you a new skill set so that when burnout starts to rear its ugly head–because it will–you’re better able to manage it, better able to see the signs, understand where it comes from, and curb it before it becomes a debilitating problem for you.
The reality is that burnout is at an all time high. When I was researching this episode, I saw some statistics that said burnout is up 20% since 2020. There are some that said burnout is up 100%. When something is up 100%, it means that the rate of burnout has doubled. We’re going to actually talk about the stages of burnout in a second, so if you’re saying, how is that classified? We’re going to get to that. But the reality that we need to face is that burnout is happening faster and more often.
I even remember being a kid and… our parents went through stress, there’s no doubt. But the stresses that they went through and the stresses that I watched my generation go through are so wildly and vastly different because the world has changed. The pace has changed. Expectations have changed. The access has changed. So burnout is on the rise. We’re living in a really high pressure society. What I want to do through this episode is learn to recognize burnout, recategorize it, and then prevent it from the start.
I found this great study and it was conducted by Winona University. The study was actually called “The Five Stages of Burnout”, but as I look through it, for me personally, I felt it was almost mistitled. I think it’s ‘the five stages of employment’ or ‘the five stages of a project’ or ‘the five stages of a commitment’ that can lead to burnout. Let’s talk about the five stages that were identified by this Winona University study and break them down.
The first is what they call the honeymoon phase. The honeymoon phase, in any relationship, we’re very familiar with. The honeymoon stage when it comes to business, when it comes to a new project, a new commitment, new ambition is that we are fired up to do whatever this thing is.
You wake up in the morning, your eyes pop open, and you can’t even wait to get to it. You’re super optimistic. You’re ready to take on more responsibility. You’re like, give me more. Pile it on, I’ll take all of it. You’re very high energy around it. Super productive, very optimistic. You have a commitment to the job at hand.
Have you ever heard the saying, figure out what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life? Sure. That’s the honeymoon phase. Creativity is flowing. Have you ever been in that–some people call it the flow state, where you sit down and it’s like your fingers just dance over a keyboard ‘cause you have a thousand ideas? Or your pen flies across the paper ‘cause you know exactly what you’re doing? You can talk a million miles a minute about something because you’re so hyper passionate about it. That is the honeymoon stage.
That is the phase that all of us love the most. There’s nobody listening to this who’s like, I’m not a fan of that. That’s where everything is feeling like it’s clicking. I’ve never been happier than I’ve been before. It just feels so in alignment. When we say things like that, we’re in the honeymoon phase. You are eagerly optimistic. You feel like anything is possible. You feel like you’ve hit the nail on the head and you can’t wait to do work on whatever it is you’ve committed to. That’s the honeymoon phase.
Then often we slide into the onset of stress. This is going to be phase two. The second stage of burnout begins with an awareness that some days are more difficult than others. The optimism starts to wane a little bit. You’ve hit some hiccups and bumps in the road. Suddenly it’s not as easy as you thought it was going to be.
All the projects that you were so excited to start are actually kind of a lot of work, and you don’t really have the education that’s going to take you there. So you need to go back and do more research, but the research is expensive and you can’t pay to take this class nor do you even have the time to take it.
I have another job I have to do, so now I’m super stressed out and my family is pressuring me to hurry up and do this thing. I’m supposed to build this clientele and it’s not supposed to be taking this long.
We start to be stressed. What was once exciting and felt like such alignment is now kind of like reality is slapping you in the face. You find yourself unable to focus because when you were in the honeymoon phase, you wanted to do all the things and you wanted to do them as fast as you can.
What that created was kind of a mess because now you have half a dozen things you want to do, but you’re only one person so you can only do so much at a time. You start to become a little irritable because you know what, no one gets it. No one understands you. People are “bothering you” when you’re trying to focus. You become a little bit dissatisfied with the work that you’re doing because it’s not producing the result that you want it to fast enough.
Often, this is when insomnia sets in. You have a harder time sleeping or falling asleep because your brain doesn’t shut off. Often this is when we withdraw from friends and family a little bit, ‘cause you don’t have time. Or you do have time, but you’re in a frustrated mood so you feel like I’m not good company, so I probably shouldn’t do that.
Productivity goes down because what was once in flow state is now hitting all these roadblocks. It’s not quite so easy to make progress, so our productivity wanes. Some people feel anxious. We start avoiding decision-making. Why do we do that? Do you guys know why we avoid decision-making? Because it allows us to not have to do the work.
I catch myself doing that sometimes where I’ll be looking at something, like a team member will ask me for a decision and I’ll be like, ugh, in order to make this decision I have to do research and I don’t have the time. What do I do? I procrastinate. I’m just going to push this out, push this out, push this out. They’ll have to wait on my decision because I don’t have time to educate myself and things go on the back burner.
Procrastination almost always comes down to I’m not educated enough or I can’t afford it. It’s lack of time, lack of education, or lack of money to be able to afford to do something. Because if you had the money, you had the time, you had the resources, you had the education, you would just do it because it would take 2.5 seconds. But these barriers get in the way and that causes stress, frustration, and tension.
Forgetfulness starts to come into play because now your thoughts are cloudy. What was once so clear starts to become a little bit fuzzy. Then sometimes it can create some physical manifestations of stress. Everybody feels stress differently. Some people get headaches. For me, I herniated some discs in my neck when I experienced really bad stress a few years back. Physical ailments often come into place in phase two.
We’re only in phase two of five friends, so buckle up for this one. Then we have phase three, which is going to be chronic stress. The third stage of working through a project, working through a new job, a new role, a new ambition is chronic stress. This is marked by consistent changes in your stress level. Instead of being motivated sometimes and stressed other times, you are constantly stressed.
This is when–has anybody asked you, “Hey, how are you doing?”, and your immediate response is: busy. How are you doing? I’m busy. Busy is not a feeling. That’s a really big sign of burnout/chronic stress. Symptoms include lack of hobbies.
How many of you have given up something that you love because you don’t have the time anymore? I was that person for a while. Running is like my meditation. Running is how I clear my mind. I have to be physically active. It’s super important. For me as a human being in this lifetime, I have to do it.
When I become super stressed, I don’t make time to physically take care of myself. My husband’s really good about being like, why don’t you take the day off and go for a run, go for a walk, hop on your bike? Because he knows it makes me feel better, lighter.
But when we’re in chronic stress, when the burnout has kicked in, you’ve convinced yourself I don’t have time to do that. I don’t have time to take a walk. I don’t have time to spend a day going to lunch with a friend. I don’t have time to watch a movie. Are you crazy? No, we’re not crazy. This is life-balance, and I’m not a big fan of the word crazy either. But these are the things that we do when we’re in balance and when we’re in burnout, we can’t justify doing those things so we skip them.
Procrastination continues. Often, you run late. How many of you are consistently late? You’re like, well I just show up late and it’s just the way that I am. But you know that if you just left your house 10 minutes earlier, you would have arrived on time. Well, I can’t leave 10 minutes early because I gotta feed the cat in the morning. My blow dryer never works. I’ve got all these issues going on. Chronic stress, right? You’ve got these chronic issues that continue to force you to be late, another sign of burnout. Social withdrawal.
Another one: resentfulness. Is anybody listening to this kind of resentful? Resentful of the path you’ve chosen; resentful of the success of those around you. Jealousy is actually a huge indicator of burnout because when you are in flow state, when you were in that honeymoon phase, when you’re not in burnout, why would you be jealous of anybody else?
What you’ve got is good. There’s no reason to be envious of another. What you have is so good, there’s just no need for it. If you’re feeling jealousy or resentment–which, resentment is often more within and jealousy is more external. We’re looking out. Either of those feelings is a huge sign of burnout, so be really tuned into that.
Apathy, meaning I just don’t care. Whatever. I don’t care. I don’t have time to care. I don’t have the patience to care. I’m over it. Big sign of chronic stress and burnout. Then we hit official burnout stage. We had honeymoon, occasional stress, consistent stress, and now we’re at burnout and this is the critical stage.
Continuing as normal is not possible at all anymore. Often people at this stage become cynical, frustrated, angry, chronic exhaustion. They feel out of control, completely out of control of their future and destiny. Have you ever felt like that?
For me, I think that I hit this burnout stage, stage four, last Fall. It was like October or November. I felt all of the things I’m about to describe to you and it was a very scary feeling and time in my life, without a doubt. Often those in burnout have an escapist mentality. They just want to get out of Dodge.
When I had my major crash and burn in the Fall, I had to leave my home and just be by myself because I needed to deal with my feelings and my emotions. It was so heavy. I felt like nobody understood me. Nobody could be around me and I was not good company. I had to extricate myself from the situation. It was bad.
As I’m looking through this list, I was like, oh, I did all of these things. This is definitely burnout for me. Feeling empty inside. I remember saying, I felt like an empty vessel, totally. Obsession over problems at work or in life.
Have you ever obsessed about an issue or obsessed about a broken relationship or obsessed about a mistake that you made? Likely you’re the only person obsessing about it. Anybody and everybody else involved has moved on with their life, but for whatever reason for you, it’s feeling a lot heavier. Big sign of burnout because you’re putting all of this weight on something that already happened.
When you’re in a place where things are flowing, it’s okay to make mistakes ‘cause tomorrow’s a new day. But when you’re in a place of burnout, it doesn’t feel like tomorrow’s a new day. It feels like everything is broken and the hopelessness starts to set in. A pessimistic outlook on work and life, like I should just close up shop. Why is this worth it? Self doubt.
Imposter syndrome is other huge sign of burnout. Occasional imposter syndrome isn’t the same as burnout. This is kind of like when all of these characteristics are colliding. I have imposter syndrome that pops up weekly; it doesn’t mean I’m always burnt out. But when you have self doubt and imposter syndrome every time you do anything, huge sign of burnout. The desire to just kind of drop out and step away.
There was a stylist that I followed, this was about two years ago, where she posted, “The pressure to sustain this business I’ve created is too much. I’m taking a six month sabbatical. I don’t know how I’m going to make money. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I know I need this.” She was burnt out. I’d be willing to bet she was feeling all of these things I described and she didn’t know any other way.
Now she’s back doing hair and she seems really happy. My hope for her is that she’s gotten a new, revised balance and she feels really great about it. We’re going to talk about how to escape burnout and how to prevent it for sure. But this happens, right? This is so real.
Then there’s the fifth stage, which is habitual burnout and this is where it gets really hard. This is where, you know how I’ve said in the past there’s a lot of people who have a lot of money and a lot of success who are completely miserable? As I did the research on burnout in this study from Winona University specifically, I tend to think those types of people are in habitual burnout. It kind of makes sense.
Habitual burnout is that the symptoms of burnout are so embedded in your life that you are going to experience a significant ongoing mental, physical, and emotional problem as opposed to occasionally experienced stress or burnout. Chronic sadness, depression, chronic mental fatigue, chronic physical fatigue.
I am in no way qualified to discuss that at length. That’s a situation where professional help is likely the only option and a great option. I have a therapist I talk to every single week. I’m a huge fan of professional help when and where needed. But if in that habitual burnout stage where literally for days, weeks, months on end, it feels like it’s never getting better, that’s likely a situation you can’t self-correct and a situation where bringing in outside support is going to be absolutely necessary.
Now, I’m actually going to add in a sixth phase because this is a phase that wasn’t included in the study. I was like, wait a minute. I think that this is a missing piece, so I’m going to add this piece in myself. The sixth phase to me is stall-out. The reason I include this is because I’ve experienced it and I’ve seen it.
In the stall out phase, you’ve decided that everything is just too hard. You throw your hands up, you start chasing lots of outs, meaning… well, that was too hard. I’m exhausted by that. I’m going to do this over here.
This was years ago now, I experienced massive burnout in the business you’re currently a part of: Thrivers Society, Thriving Stylists, Britt Seva, all of it. This was three or four years ago now, a long time ago. I had a very small team. The business was growing fast and I couldn’t keep up.
My husband was working with the fire department at the time. He was coming home from an overnight shift. He had got home at probably 4:00 AM or something like that. I had been up all night. It’s 4:00 AM and I’ve poured like 70 candles. Our whole kitchen, living, dining area is full of candles. I remember he walked in and he just stood in the doorway and he said, what are we doing today?
I said, I think I’m going to build a candle business. He said, okay, I’m going to let you do this, I’m going to go to sleep, and then we’re going to talk about this when I wake up. He let me do my candles and came back and was like, whoa, what is happening?
I had this super successful business. Everything looked great. Everything was growing great. The business was profitable, but I was so exhausted by it that I had convinced myself that selling candles at farmers markets would be much easier for me. Classic sign of burnout. I just was so tired of it, that I was looking for an escape route and candle making was going to be my route.
Now I still actually make candles as a hobby. I don’t sell them at farmers markets, but that was a classic sign of, whoa, I need to fix this. We’re gonna talk about how to fix it in a second.
You question all of your life choices. I definitely did that. You know, why did I even get into this? I should have become a, I don’t know, a dentist or something else. Why didn’t even choose to do this? I should have stayed in the salon, whatever. You start to question all of your decisions. Then you end up adding more to your plate rather than actually creating space.
That’s the irony of stall out. I see people do this all the time. I’m burnt out of being a stylist, so I’m going to start a second career. Got it. Sometimes that’s necessary and sometimes it’s super smart, but in creating that second career it’s really easy to also create unintentional burnout.
Which is why when you’re in Thrivers Society and you’re learning the system, do you remember
the last level on the marketing and retention hourglass? The very last one? It’s called Lead. I always say do not start a second venture until your first business as a stylist is scalable because you will for sure create burnout. I’ve coached to that for a decade now.
Don’t bother opening a salon until your business as a stylist is scalable. Don’t bother becoming an educator until your business as a stylist is scalable. Scalable means you’re actively scaling your schedule back and still earning more money. If you’re not actively scaling your schedule back, but you’re adding more to your plate, how are you rationally not intentionally creating burnout? You’re not creating more room for yourself, but you’re creating more work, and you’re convincing yourself that you’re building a freedom lifestyle. That’s… whoa!
I did that for a time, so I understand why we do it. We do it because we’re like, well, I need the money I have now. I can’t sacrifice the money I have now. I want a safety net for myself, so this is like the hustle phase.
First of all, hustle has changed a lot in the last few years. There’s a reason why you don’t hear me say hustle a lot on the podcast or in my coaching at all. I’m not a fan of the term. I think hustle actually has a fairly negative connotation and the connotation is don’t sleep. Don’t eat. Don’t spend time with your friends. Live as frugally as possible and work all the time. That might not be everybody’s definition. It’s just my personal one, and I’m not a fan of that lifestyle.
When you’re in Thrivers Society, I teach to the freedom lifestyle, which is: work less, earn more, create a bigger, better, brighter life for yourself, which I think is what we should all be all striving for. I think often when we try to create avenues, we create unintentional burnout because we didn’t make room.
It’s like if you’re trying to eat Thanksgiving dinner and when I eat Thanksgiving, I get down. I’m on a whole other level. But I don’t put the entree on my plate and then put a big scoop of salad on top of the mashed potatoes and turkey, and then make a scoop of Berry cobbler on top of all that. Then I’ve got a plate with three courses on it and I’m eating it all at once.
I love all those things, but berry cobbler plus stuffing plus roasted root vegetables plus turkey plus arugula sounds kind of weird. But often we do that when we’re building business. We’re like, I want all the things so I’m going to pile them on my plate. Then you’re surprised when you’ve got this weird plate of stuff and it’s called burnout. So instead of doing that, you always have to create room if you’re going to take on more. If you don’t, hitting these stages of burnout is very likely.
Here’s the reality of burnout, and it’s something that I’ve realized over time. I want to thank Jess on my team because she reminded me of this. She said that burnout doesn’t happen when you’re doing things you love. Burnout happens when you’re focusing in the wrong areas.
It took me a minute when she said that, I was like, no. I get burned out doing things I love all the time. But I stepped back and thought about it. No, I get burnt out in the business that I love, but the burnout actually only hits when I’m doing activities I’m not a fan of.
You can be working within a scope that you love, but doing things that bring you down and that can cause burnout. I realized that that was right. When we’re doing things with those we love it can be the craziest, longest, busiest day ever, but it doesn’t create burnout. You can be tired, but you’re not burnt out. You close your eyes and you have a little smile on your face, ‘cause it was a joyous day even though it was packed. Versus you can have a day that was kind of minimal, not a lot happened, but the whole day was filled with things that you don’t like and you might feel burnt out. I think that was such a great reminder of, if you are in the place where you’re seeing burnout or habitual burnout, how are you filling your days and your time?
Are you focusing on what brings you joy or are you just chasing money, chasing opportunity, or the FOMO is so real? Or you haven’t learned to scale your business as a stylist so you’re working 14 hours a day because you’re afraid to turn a client away, because if you don’t work 14 hours a day or see a hundred guests in a week, you won’t make enough money–which are all lies, but we get caught up in that cycle.
So I want to ask you, are you the creator of your own burnout? Are you actually looking at what makes you feel that way and really evaluate where you find joy and what brings you down?
I want to actually point you to another podcast. It’s an oldie, but a goodie. It’s episode four of the show. When I released the Thriving Stylist Podcast back in January of 2018, I released eight episodes at once and this is one of them. It’s called “The 4-part Cycle That Every Stylist Experiences”, and a piece of it is burnout. But I talk about what we’re doing when we’re feeling good, how we get to that place of burnout, and then how to get back around again to a place of feeling good.
You can go to thethrivingstylist.com and just search for “4 part cycle”. If you search those search terms in either the blog or podcast category, it’ll come right up. If you search anywhere you find your podcasts “episode four of the podcast”, if you just search “4 part cycle”, it should come up as well. But it’s episode four of this show. I talk about preventing burnout, how to ensure you get back to a place of inspiration, and how to stay high mentally so that you’re always achieving everything that you want to.
Here’s an actionable step before you listen to that podcast: sit down today and take a minute to write down all of the things that currently feel like stressors. All of the things that currently feel heavy, confusing, broken in your business, and don’t make an action item list yet. Just list all the things that feel yucky, whatever they are.
Then listen to the episode and start to formulate a plan of creating more joy in your life. Start to create a plan of working your way backwards so that you stay in that honeymoon phase. Eliminate some of the things that cause burnout.
If you’re lost on how to do that, I strongly suggest you head to thriverssociety.com. We are on the verge of releasing a new, updated program in just a few weeks. I know you’re going to absolutely love it. Most of all, I want you to continue building a life and a business filled with wealth, joy, and happiness. You guys so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on The next one.
