Gentle Achiever
or How to move forward without a burnout
This story was originally written a couple of years ago for a speech that I gave to a small group of female leaders. This week @chris_85508 reminded me of it, and it felt like it is the time to put it out there publicly. Enjoy, and I trust you will take away something for yourself.
In the summer of 2014, I found myself on the floor of my office, behind closed doors crying and not being able to stand up.
In the next three months, every single workday looked the same.
I would wake up an hour before I had to appear at the office, I would put a smile on my face, would walk into the room full of my colleagues, exchange jokes, saying hi.
Then I would lock myself in my office and would start crying.
Every day it would take me approximately 2–3h at the office to open my email.
Things that I have been doing easily before were not working for me anymore.
Around 2006 I read David Alan’s Getting Things Done. I studied the book to find the right strategies and tools to bring me where I wanted to be in the future, achieve something big by putting myself into a structure.
And this “being productive” worked for a while, till it didn’t anymore.
Coming back to me crying on the floor story, it took me three months to tell my co-founder I am experiencing Burnout. My level of energy wasn’t anywhere near my level of energy that I had years before.
Burnout is a peculiar place to be.
On the one hand, physically, everything is okay with you. It is not an injury.
On the surface, you are doing fine; it is hard for people who are outside of your closest circle to know that you are experiencing it. You might cancel a couple of meetings, disappear for a couple of months from the social radar, but that’s it. As you heard before, my cofounder and my colleagues had no clue I was not feeling well until I asked for help.
As soon as I started opening up about my experience, tons of people opened up back. I started calling the burnout condition — startup syndrome.
My First Burnout was a blessing. It kickstarted a journey I didn’t know I needed, and it created a vision.
The vision that I want to live in an honest startup world where both startups and investors act out of love for technology and people. That people inside the startup ecosystem communicate openly and listen entirely.
This vision and the journey made me change what I do. As a person with a hardware and business development background, I became an executive coach, and since 2014 I have mentored and coached hundreds of startup founders and their teams.
But enough about me.
You might want to know who the hell is a gentle achiever.
Next to my vision, I had a personal question — how can I keep moving forward and creating my future yet sustain the level of energy and self-care that I needed to keep myself healthy and happy.
By observing myself, studying coaching and self-development, and working with my clients, I figured out that we in the startup industry go through more or less the same path.
What brings us to startups is a willingness to create and build the future.
When we start this journey, we mobilize ourselves; we metaphorically “throw-away” everything that doesn’t serve the future vision. We optimize time; we save on sleeping; we ask our beloved ones to wait; we ask ourselves to wait.
We create a personality out of ourselves that does not need anything and can run forward without a break.
It works for some time, and at some point, we start seeing that our performance is decreasing, we are losing focus, our judgments are blurred, and we lose the things we love around us.
Here comes a crisis — a burnout, a major relationship falls apart, our company’s growth starts sinking, you lose interest in whatever you do. You know the drill. So we need to stop.
As I told you, Burnout is not an injury, but your body cannot function anymore.
So what is happening?
The easiest way to explain it to you — is to look at three hormones: Cortisol, Dopamine, and Oxytocin.
When we decide to achieve something, we have motivation, energy, and goal, and we start running.
Then we see barriers on our way. Looking at the startups — funding is running out, lack of people, competitors are rising, we as founders experience fear and/or anger — with this, we activate cortisol production in the adrenal glands. Or we might be critical to ourselves, and by internally blaming ourselves, we create the same chemical reaction in our body.
The problem with that is — more cortisol we have in our body, the more cortisol we develop.
To balance it, we automatically look for ways out — small achievements, someone telling us that we are doing great, proof that we are succeeding, in total — happiness.
At this moment, the second hormone is developing in the prefrontal cortex. Its name is Dopamine.
It has a concise but addictive effect. You might experience it while using social networks — I sometimes find myself waiting for likes on my picture attached to my phone for hours. With the same effect, we enjoy crossing out items on our to-do lists.
These hormones are a part of the sympathetic nervous system, quickly said — fight or flight response.
If we continuously stay only in these two states — it is where burnout starts.
To balance it out, we need to activate the parasympathetic nervous system — or rest and digest.
There are effective and ineffective ways.
We, women, know the most ineffective way — eating. By forcing digestion, we force our body to switch into the parasympathetic mode. Then we eat again, and again and it might be one of the many ways we learn to calm ourselves down.
The trick to stopping burning out is to find effective ways to activate the parasympathetic nervous system. The Hormone that is connected to this system is oxytocin (hypothalamus).
It is about spending time with your beloved ones, napping during the day, walking in the park, playing with your kids. Everything that has no goal.
Feelings that you experience under oxytocin help us to bond with others and help you recover.
If we forget about recovery or think that it is just a waste of time, we constantly keep ourselves in a sympathetic state, and the only way out for our body is to fall out into burnout.
Fear Anger, short moments of happiness, fear anger, brief moments of joy, exhaustion.
The only way out we see here is to stop achieving, at all — you might know those managers and founders that decided to stop running and concentrated on the oxytocin area. They start looking into their old hobbies, into the field of their life that they threw away with the wish to create a bright future. In this step of the journey, they reintegrate all parts of themselves back and spend time connecting to others. They think they don’t want to run anymore.
The issue here is that the achiever doesn’t go away. If you’ve been an achiever, you know that the future is calling.
And slowly but surely, the founders start to long for creation. Start to look for ways to move forward yet include themselves fully into the picture.
Here comes The gentle achiever:
- Achiever optimizes for time
- Gentle Achiever optimizes for energy
- Achiever lives in fear and immediate pleasure and sees sleep and rest as a waste of time.
- Gentle Achiever integrates rest, bonding with others, and time with themselves into their weekly routines to recover.
- Achiever views others as the means to their goals
- Gentle Achiever sees others for who they are and respects their boundaries, values, and personality traits.
- Achiever wants everyone to follow their way
- Gentle achiever allows others to choose their path
- Achiever runs constant sprints and thinks there is an end to the game.
- Gentle achiever views life as an infinite game.
- Achiever criticizes herself for not being perfect
- Gentle achiever accepts her preferences and challenges herself with love and care.
- Achiever survives
- Gentle achiever lives…
