UIP- 🎙️ Episode 14: The Burnout Blueprint
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[00:00:00] This is unapologetically in Power, the podcast for ambitious women who are done performing and ready to lead from their unapologetic truth. I am Jennifer Damaskos and here. We don't play small in this space. We dismantle burnout, reclaim your energy and activate the unapologetic leader you are always meant to be, so you can lead, earn, and live from your unapologetic self.
[00:01:00] Burnout doesn't usually look like collapse. It doesn't arrive with flashing lights or a dramatic meltdown. It sneaks in quietly through the endless yes to projects that don't align with your vision through the late nights you call "just this quarter." Through the mask of, "I've got this handled."
When in reality, your business is running you instead of the other way around. Here's the truth. Burnout isn't just exhaustion, it's misalignment's.
what happens when the rules you've been living by don't match the business you're meant to build when you're succeeding by someone else's definition instead of your own. Today we're breaking down the burnout blueprint, the hidden patterns that high achieving women fall into, and how to rewrite them before they cost you more [00:02:00] than you realize.
For me, burnout didn't look like staying in bed all day. It looked like high functioning efficiency with a smile. My calendar was packed edge to edge with client calls that drained me. My inbox was a flutter request. I felt obligated to fulfill my phone. Never stopped buzzing with quick questions while I tried to keep two businesses afloat from the outside.
I looked like I was managing it all successfully. Inside I was brittle, tired, resentful, completely disconnected from why I started my business in the first place. The wake up call came during a client strategy session. I was giving this brilliant advice, set boundaries, focus on your zone of genius, charge what you're worth, and suddenly I realized.
I wasn't [00:03:00] following a single piece of my own guidance. Oh, I was building everyone else's version of success while my own vision gathered dust, and that is when it hit me. Burnout wasn't about doing too much, it was about doing too much of the wrong things. The things that didn't serve my future self, my vision or my definition of meaningful work, that was my burnout blueprint and it was slowly eroding everything I'd worked to build.
Here's what I wish more women knew. Burnout has patterns and if you can see them, you can stop them. The Maslo Burnout Inventory. The gold standard psychological measure shows three dimensions. The first is exhaustion, [00:04:00] the physical and emotional drain of running on empty. The second one is depersonalization.
Its detachment where you go numb to your work or clients, and the third one is reduced accomplishment. That voice saying, no matter how much you do, it's never enough. But here's what recent research reveals about entrepreneurial burnout. The 2023 Gallup found that entrepreneurs report burnout 72% more often than traditional employees.
McKinsey's women in the workplace for 2023 revealed that 42% of women leaders feel burned out compared to 35% of men, and that gap has widened 32% since 2019. Yikes. Harvard Business Review estimates. [00:05:00] Burnout costs us businesses 190 billion annually in healthcare, but the bigger cost is loss, leadership and innovation.
Stanford's Dr. Christina Maslo identified six systematic mismatches that drive burnout, workload control, reward, community. Fairness and values. When entrepreneurs align their business waddle with their values, burnout drops by 54%. And in the Journal of Business Venturing, Dr. Brad Aon found burned out entrepreneurs generate 23% lower revenue over three years, and recovery takes an average of 18 months without intervention.
[00:06:00] So let's be clear. Burnout isn't weakness. It's not personal failure, it's identity erosion. It's what happens when your vision gets buried under obligations you never agreed to. So let's look at some examples. Here's how I see burnout show up for high achieving women entrepreneurs. Pattern number one.
It's the over-delivery trap saying yes to every client request, even outside of scope or their pricing too low, then over-delivering to prove your worth. Adding extras that weren't contracted out of fear, they won't see the value. The second pattern is the control Everything syndrome. Refusing to hire help because no one can do it like I can.
Running every meeting and project yourself [00:07:00] becoming the bottleneck in your own business growth. Pattern three is calendar stuffing, filling every white space with calls and obligations. Back to back client sessions with zero transition time mistaking busy for productive.
The fourth pattern is the invisible labor load, as I like to call it. It's managing everyone else's emotions and expectations, carrying the unspoken mental load of your team and family. It is taking responsibility for outcomes that were never yours to carry. See, these patterns look like productivity, but really.
Their burnout in disguise. So the practical exercise I wanna do today is the burnout audit, [00:08:00] and step one of this is your energy audit. Ask yourself, where am I exhausted? What activities drain me versus energize me? Which clients leave me depleted versus inspired? Then your second step is your resentment radar.
Ask yourself, where am I resentful? What am I doing that I never actually agreed to? What should am I carrying that don't serve my vision? And finally, you need to do a fulfillment check. Ask yourself, where am I under fulfilled? What would I stop doing if money weren't a factor? What would I start doing if I trusted my vision completely?[00:09:00]
That's your burnout blueprint. Not proof you're broken, but a map showing you exactly where your business needs to shift. And this is why in Rise module two reveal we go deeper than service level fixes. We go deeper than surface level fixes because burnout isn't just about exhaustion, it's about identity, shadows, and power leaks that are draining your life force.
Inside module two, you'll uncover your personal burnout blueprint where energy is leaking in your business. The hidden beliefs driving overgiving and boundary violations, which patterns are inherited versus chosen so you can stop carrying what isn't yours and your power leak inventory, the exact places where you've been giving away [00:10:00] authority.
Because you can't heal what you can't see, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. So let me ask you, where is burnout quietly running your business decisions? How many opportunities are you missing because you're too drained to think strategically?
And what's the real cost of carrying this burnout blueprint for another year? Your burnout blueprint doesn't have to define you. You get to rewrite it, and if you're ready for the structured process, that doesn't just heal burnout, but prevents it from coming back, rise.
Enrollment is open now. This is unapologetically in Power. I'm Jennifer Damaskos, and your burnout rewrite starts [00:11:00] today.
