63. Burnout

0:00 Hey, What is up everyone? It’s Jennie Dildine, the LDS mission coach and you are listening to the LDS mission Podcast, episode number 63. Burnout. I’m Jennie, the LDS mission coach. And whether you’re preparing to serve a mission, currently serving a returned missionary or a missionary mama like me, I created this podcast just for you. Are you searching for epic confidence? Ready to love yourself and to learn the how of doing hard things? Then let’s go. I will help you step powerfully into your potential and never question your purpose. Again. It’s time to embrace yourself. Embrace your mission, embrace your life, and embrace what’s next. Hey, everybody, and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here with me today. I love hanging out with you every single week and getting some helpful tools and strategies out to our favorite people, the missionaries and the return missionaries who sacrifice a big chunk of their lives to go out and serve. Right? It’s not easy out there, as many of you are finding out and it’s not even easy for us to have, you know our kids out. And it can be hard to watch them kind of struggle a little bit out there. And so I created this podcast just for you guys, so that we get get more helpful tools and strategies out to all of you. I thought it would be fun today, if I would just read a couple reviews from the podcast. I just so appreciate anybody who is willing to go and rate this podcast and review this podcast. It helps so much. It helps us get the word out about what we’re doing here in trying to help our missionaries become empowered to create the exact mission experience that they want. So this one is from Scripture beats mama, thank you so much Scripture beats mama for writing this review. She says thanks for doing this. I think what you’re doing is really important. So I’ve been sharing with all my missionary mama friends and my nieces and nephews of mission age. I love that. Thank you so much Scripture beats mama. And I think you’re right. It is very important what we’re doing here. This one says Thank you, Jenny. This is from Jenica P. Thank you, Jenny for your insights and your wisdom I have learned and will continue to learn so many incredible tools on this podcast. Thank you so much. Jenica P I appreciate that review. This one is from CeCe Sweeney. Thank you CeCe Sweeney for leaving a review. Jenny is so passionate about her work. And this podcast is proof that is true. I am super passionate about this work. This is filled with tips and practicals. For the missionary This podcast is a must for every missionary. Thank you guys so much for these reviews, I read every single review. And if you guys get a chance, I would so appreciate it if you would

3:24 review this podcast so we can get more news out to more people. And just share it just tell more of your friends about this podcast. That would be amazing. This is important work we’re doing here. So thank you so much. Today is just a continuation of sort of what we talked about last week. Last week, we talked about wrestling with rest. And I don’t think you have to go back and listen to that one. If you haven’t listened to that one. I don’t think it’s going to make this podcast about burnout any less valuable if you don’t go watch it. But I think it would be useful for you to listen to that one kind of in tandem with this one about burnout. Now, I’ve been thinking about burnout as it relates to being out on the mission as it relates to finishing a semester as it relates to just being at the end of like our studies at all. Sometimes I think we can end up being burnout in the middle of stuff too. And so we’re just going to talk a little bit about that. Now the last podcast episode 62, which is stop wrestling with rest. What I think happens is that if we don’t take time to rest, that is when we become burned out. So the way I like to think of about it is that stretching ourselves or doing hard things without rest equals burnout. But stretching ourselves and doing hard things with rest equals growth and transformation. So that’s why I feel like rest is so important. And remember, we talked about the three kinds of risks, which were mental rest, emotional rest, and actual physical rest. Okay, let’s just talk about what being burnt out actually means. I found a couple of things online. This is from the Mayo Clinic. Burnout is a special type of work related stress. So maybe you’re not in an actual job, maybe your job is your mission. Maybe your job is your schooling, maybe your job is to take care of baby or your children, whatever your work is. This says it’s a special type of work related stress, it says it’s a state of physical or emotional exhaustion. That involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity. Here’s a couple other signs of burnout that I found physical and mental overwhelm, and fatigue, moodiness and irritability, inability to make decisions, loss of motivation. Okay. So those are just some clues for you about being burned out. And I wanted us to talk about maybe seven things to sort of think about, if you are running low on this motivation, or if you are feeling burnt out. Or if someone you love is running low on motivation, or feeling burnt out. One of the analogies I thought of was an old locomotive. So I think some of those were run, like by coal, that you know, that fire or that furnace would propel the train forward. Some of them I think were run on Steam. Like, I think at Disneyland, they still have an old steam locomotive. My grandpa’s love trains. So I should probably know more about this. But when I thought about being burnt out, it’s like the source is dwindling. Maybe we’re running out of coal, and then that when we’re running out of coal, it doesn’t create the energy needed to keep us moving forward. Or maybe whatever is creating that steam engine, I think they just put water in it. Is that right? You guys? Once that water becomes depleted, then we start running out of steam or we feel burned out. But we’re going to talk about all of the reasons that that is totally okay. So here’s some things I want us to think about. Number one, is when we’re feeling burnt out, we’re gonna have some clean pain and some dirty pain. And I need to just do a whole podcast on this. I think it’s maybe come up a couple times on these podcasts. But clean pain sounds like this. Oh, I didn’t know that at this point in the mission, or at this point in my job that I would be feeling so burnt out. That’s interesting. I wonder what’s going on for me. Kind of a bummer. Totally fine, that makes sense.

8:25 But our brains have a tendency to indulge in dirty pain, which sounds like this, I shouldn’t be burned out. I shouldn’t feel this way. Something is wrong with the situation and something is wrong with me if I feel burnt out. Clean pain is an acceptance of the situation and the way that you’re feeling. I notice I’m feeling burned out. Dirty pain is a resistance to the situation and what is actually true. So number two, the key to allowing for this clean pain is knowing it’s okay that you feel a little burnt out. It actually makes sense. Especially if you’re on a mission, or especially if you’re on a job, especially if you have the same thing that happens day after day after day. Your brain is gonna get a little bored with it. It makes sense that you’d be running low on motivation, and that you’d be running low on Steam. But it can be super cleansing to just allow for that disappointment. Just allow for that lack of motivation. Just notice it and then decide what you want to do next, because the problem you guys is when we get into dirty pain, like something’s wrong with me. I shouldn’t feel burnt out. It’s not okay that it’s this way. That kind of dirty pain leads to mental exhaustion. That kind of thing. battle that we have with our brain is what burns us out. What we find is if we’re really good at sort of just allowing our emotions, and I talked about this in Episode 62, is if we’re really good at just allowing those emotions, when they come up, and just processing them as they come up, and we quit fighting them. They’re actually not that terrible. So burnout, what I find mostly is mental and emotional exhaustion, not the exhaustion of just feeling feelings, but the exhaustion of fighting those feelings. Which is what happens in dirty pain, we resist what’s true, which is okay, we’re burnout, we resist what’s true. And then that resistance is the exhausting part. Because in resisting what’s true about ourselves in the way we’re feeling, we’re resisting ourselves. Number three, to kind of consider is that sometimes I feel like we’ve created a culture where there’s an environment where there are good missionaries and bad missionaries. Sometimes I think we have an idea about what a quote unquote good missionary looks like, for example, good missionaries always care. They’re always motivated. They never lose, lose steam, they never get burnt out. So we can just sort of question a little bit, what actually is a good missionary? What if it’s true, that good missionaries lose steam and motivation from time to time, maybe losing steam is still really doing an amazing job as a missionary. And what you’ll find is, if you make space for that, and take care of yourself through that, it won’t hold on forever, you’ll actually come out of the unmotivated quicker, if we don’t resist, it will come out quicker. Number four, the other thing to maybe consider is that, you might be feeling a little bit lost about your purpose as a missionary or as a returned missionary. What is happening next for you, your job, your semester, whatever. Now, I want to remind you, this is kind of circling back to a lot of other podcasts. But the truth about your purpose is one of the podcasts I teach. But your purpose is not the things that you do in your actions. Your purpose is so much more than what you do. Your purpose is what you believe. It’s what you are thinking it’s what you are thinking about yourself and about your role in the world right now. So maybe consider for number four, that your purpose right now, if you’re feeling a little burned out, is to learn what it’s like to be a human in the world who loses steam. Who feels a little burnout, and it’s fine. It really is you guys.

13:25 Number five. Another concept that we might want to consider is that if you’re in burnout, you probably have been saying to yourself, lots of things about this burnout. If you’ve lost motivation or lost steam, what you’re probably most likely saying to yourself is I don’t want to run out of steam, I shouldn’t run out of steam. I don’t want to feel lack of motivation. I don’t want to feel burned out. And so we know what we don’t want but here’s the tricky part with not wanting stuff is our brain doesn’t know what to do with not wanting what are all our brain hears is like lose steam, lose motivation burned out, right? So instead of letting your brain fixate on what it doesn’t want, see if you can create a goal of something that you do want. And it can be small, it can be like, I’m gonna go out to get a soda with my friends after this class. I’m gonna go and I’m going to set a new appointment with a member. Okay, and notice how when we kind of lay the track if we’re still thinking about the train analogy, if we lay that track and put like a destination at the end, our brain will start adding the steam adding the coal to get us more Moving towards it, where when we kind of fixate on what we don’t want, it keeps us stuck. There’s no problem for our brain to solve. So see if you can choose something that you want instead of something you don’t want. And just, your brain will automatically start working towards it. Now, one thing I want you to kind of this is a little side tangent, but what all of us want, ideally, our brains, all of us want to just feel something. So let’s decide, I want to feel happy. Guess what, Friends, Happiness doesn’t come from hanging out with your friends. Happiness comes from your thinking. So we can just ask ourselves, What do I got to do right now to feel happy. Notice how we’ve created a destination, it gives some track for our locomotive to run down and towards number six, we gotta stop being in resistance to what’s true. All of us in our lives will find the most peace and accepting that nothing is wrong. Our brain wants to think everything is wrong. But we can just say to ourselves sentences like, this is the part of the mission where I feel a little burned out. Okay. Well, now, instead of like, this is the worst, I can’t feel this way. Or this is the part of my new job. Where I feel like I’m losing steam and a little motivation. Okay. Can we just accept that knowing that it’s O. K? Like, maybe there’s a part of us that can tap into this was always supposed to happen this way? What am I supposed to get out of this opportunity? And maybe it’s rest, like we talked about in episode 62. Maybe it’s just learning how to process feeling low on motivation, feeling burnt out. And taking action anyway. missionaries, and humans are supposed to lose steam, sometimes. It’s part of our journey. And it’s totally fine. Just make sure that you’re kind of onto your brain when it’s trying to tell you that there’s certain ways that we should feel and certain ways that we shouldn’t feel. Not true. We’re human. You guys, if we were supposed to be robots, we wouldn’t be robots. But we’re not. Remember, there are no wrong emotions. There’s no wrong thoughts. It’s just your brain, your emotions, you’re a human. And it’s our resistance of both of those that usually causes burnout and exhaustion. running out of steam or motivation usually comes from not wanting the way that things are. So the last thing I want to offer to you number seven, if you’re feeling a little burnt out, is there’s no wrong way to be a human. There’s no wrong way to be a missionary. Truly, I truly believe that.

18:26 I actually believe that the most perfect person that ever walked the earth, Jesus Christ that he ran out of steam, sometimes he was a human, just like us. Sometimes the Savior, He felt tired, and he ran out of steam. My guess is is he wasn’t like there’s something wrong with me, I’ve got to keep going. He was like, Okay, maybe it’s time to slow down. Sometimes we eat sometimes he would even take a break and call it a day. He didn’t make it mean that he was doing it wrong, or he couldn’t live up to his purpose, or that he was bad in some way. He didn’t even make it mean that if he needed a little bit of rest, that maybe he didn’t care. And then it was terrible that he felt that way. Instead, what he did is he focused on what he wanted that end result which was to deeply care for people. And he knew how to show compassion for himself to even when he was tired, even when he was burned out. Even when he felt a little lack of motivation. He knew how to take care of himself and showed compassion to the part of him that was human. And you guys, we can do the same thing. If your train is running out of steam, it’s okay. The easiest and best way to get more coal or more water into your locomotive is to rest It’s to not make it mean that you’re a bad person or that something’s wrong. I promise you, whatever you’re feeling, you should be feeling. If you need to rest, rest, because stretching yourself and doing hard things without rest equals burnout and stretching yourself with rest equals growth and transformation. It will get you where you’re wanting to go. I promise whatever you’re feeling totally valid. Totally normal. You’re right on track. All right, you guys have the most amazing week. We will see you next time. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. Listen, if you are learning a lot from this podcast, and you like what you’re hearing, you will absolutely love hopping on a free strategy call with me. That’s where you and I meet up one on one and talk specifically about what is going on for you. I love teaching young adults the mental and emotional tools that they need to overcome worry and anxiety, serve the successful missions they’ve always dreamed of and navigate their post mission experience with confidence. So go to Jennie dildine.com, and click on the work with me link. I would love to meet you. And I would love to get you some helpful tools and strategies to help you fully embrace whatever is next for you. And in the meantime, no matter which part of the mission experience you are involved in. Just know that Jennie, the LDS mission coach is thinking about you every single day.