Erica: Hey, girl. By now, you know I have Her Collective, my online community for ambitious women who are done doing it alone. Her Collective is for the women who are smart, capable, and driven, but they find themselves stuck on the sticky floors like self doubt, burnout, and waiting for permission that quite honestly never comes. Inside HER, you get more than motivation. You get real support, real strategies, and real momentum.

Erica: We work on things like clarifying what you want now and what's coming next, building confidence without burning yourself out, navigating hard conversations, career moves, and leadership moments with clarity, and surrounding yourself with women who actually get it. This isn't about hustling harder. It's about moving intentionally with the right tools and the right people in your corner. If you're ready to stop spinning, start choosing yourself, and build a career in life that actually feels aligned, I'd love to welcome you inside her collective. You can learn more and join us at www.joinhercollective.com.

Erica: Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone. What are you supposed to do if you're on the brink of burnout? Or maybe you are burnt out, but you just can't quit your job or your life? Burnout recovery where you can take several months off, go on a yoga meditation retreat, and really take quality time to evaluate your life and what you want it to look like going forward, y'all, that is a privilege, and it's one that most of us, quite honestly, just don't have. Now I know when I burnt out, the solution was not for me to step away from my job.

Erica: Losing my job would have meant more burnout, more stress, and quite honestly devastating consequences that would have just sidelined me for God knows how long. So all of these stories that we hear about these amazing powerful women who are in the throes of burnout, who have the privilege to step away from their careers, that's great. But it's not the reality for most of us. So what can you do? How can you survive burnout if you can't quit your job or walk away from your responsibilities?

Erica: If you're like me, you may have found yourself in this position where you are asking yourself every single day, how much longer can I keep this up? And then if that's you, you need to hear this episode. There are options. There are things you can do that do not require you to quit your job or walk away from your responsibilities.

Erica: According to the American Institute of Stress, thirty three percent of people report feeling stress at extreme levels. Seventy seven percent of people experience stress to the point of it affecting their physical health and seventy three percent experience stress that impacts their mental health in significant ways. Now first of all, the fact that there even is an American Institute of Stress should indicate that there's a problem. But the second shocking thing that I want to share with you is that there is no concrete definition for burnout. The World Health Organization classifies it as a quote occupational hazard.

Erica: Y'all, an occupational hazard? I can't, but they define it as feelings of energy depletion and exhaustion, increased mental distance from one's job or feelings of negativity or cynicism related to one's job, and reduced personal and professional efficacy. So if you've just heard that those three checks and you are having this, oh my god moment where you feel like you check every single one of those boxes, stick with me. I want you to just take a deep breath because guess what? We're gonna get through you that.

Erica: We're gonna help you get through that today. Now while burnout has not been truly defined by the medical community, I think that we all know what it feels like. Now when I think about burnout, it feels like you are standing in the middle of this burning down house. There are flames all around you. You can feel the heat on your skin.

Erica: You are sweating profusely, and you know that the house is about to collapse all around you. And someone comes up to you, and they put their hand on your back, and they point you to the safest exit. It's right there. It's free and clear of obstacles. But if you're burning out, you might feel like you just can't take a step forward towards that exit.

Erica: For me, that burnout was really solidified when I had to go to the doctor's office. It was a new doctor, so I plugged it into the GPS, and my GPS was taking me all around the city. It was just having some sort of calibration problem. And so by the time I actually made it to the doctor's office, I was late. I was super stressed because of all of that, and I get into the parking garage, and it is just a cluster.

Erica: There are people everywhere. There's no parking spots. I'm just watching the minutes tick by thinking about how late I am, and y'all, I am so close to tears. And when I finally get into my parking spot, I feel like I just can't walk into the doctor's office. After all of that, after I made it there, To me, that is that nonmedical definition of burnout.

Erica: It is that feeling. And if you can tune into that feeling and pay attention to the burning down house around you or to the crazy parking garage, you can find your way out, and you can do this without quitting your job and without running away from all your responsibilities. Now burnout feels and looks like exhaustion, frustration at the littlest of things, cynicism. You feel like you just you've been so busy all day, but you didn't get anything done. It's the inability to sleep without the help of some sort of a substance.

Erica: Now my friend, Erin Stafford, in her book, the type a trap, she has a burnout assessment, and she listed 100 symptoms in several different categories, health, work, faith and spirituality, family and friends, finances and fun. And you check off next to each one if you feel like that symptom applies to you. And depending on where you rank, you may find yourself in the shallow ends of burnout, you might be entering the wake up call area of burnout, or you could be in the danger zone. But my point of sharing this is wherever you are on the spectrum of burnout, you have to understand where you're starting so that you can take that first step in dealing with it. So what if we can't walk away from our life?

Erica: We've taken an assessment. We know we're burnt out. Maybe you don't even have to take an assessment to know how burnt out you are. But what do you do if you can't walk away from your life and from your responsibilities, from your kids, from your family, from your jobs? Now the first thing I'm gonna tell you, you have to create more time for you.

Erica: I know. I know. I get it. Time is precious and you are already so short on time. You already do not have enough time.

Erica: If you did, you might not be burnt out, But you've gotta create more time for you, and you do this by prioritizing and delegating. Yep. It's basic. It's simple, but it's gotta be done. And this is how I want you to do it.

Erica: I want you to get a blank sheet of paper and I want you to brain dump all of the things that are on your mind, that are on your mental to do list. Every little thing, carpool, work emails, teacher gifts for your school, the dog grooming appointments, spirit week, your partner's work event, every other little thing that takes space in your head, I want you to write it all out. And this is super important because just by doing this, by putting those mental to dos on paper, you are creating space in your brain. Now for me, when I was in the throes of burnout, I wish I knew this. Because if I had just taken a moment out of my hectic and frenetic day to brain dump, I would have had a little bit of this mental clearing.

Erica: But once you have brain dumped everything out onto the paper, it doesn't stop there. We're gonna do what I call my four p exercise. You're gonna take your list. And next to each task, I want you to map out if you should be the one performing the task, if you should pass it to someone else, if you should postpone it because it's not mission critical, or if you should purge the task. So perform it, pass it, postpone it, or purge it.

Erica: Now for example, one of the things on my everyday to do list was packing my kids lunch. Let's run it through the four p test. I could perform this task by packing the lunch myself. I could pass it by making my kids pack their lunch or a partner. I can't postpone this one because, you know, kids gotta eat and it's frowned upon by the school if you send them to school with no lunch.

Erica: Or I could purge this task by ordering them what is called hot lunch every day, which is just school delivered lunch. Now what I choose to do with this task should depend on a few things, but it is up to me if I want to prioritize packing my kids lunch every day or teaching them to pack their lunch or if I want to purge it by outsourcing this task. Now once you've run through your entire list, the perform, pass, purge, or postpone, took me a hot second to remember. Once you have run through that entire list, I want you to take a real long hard look at what you should be purging. That's the one I want you to do first.

Erica: Can you purge weekly one on ones with each team member? Maybe turn them into biweekly sessions. What about cleaning your house? Maybe you can outsource this task or ask someone to help you with some of those duties. Picking up your kids from school every day, maybe you can carpool with someone else in the neighborhood, or running that report at work each week.

Erica: Can you automate that? Now the beauty here is that you get to decide, but the hard part is going to be the letting go of some of these tasks. Us high achievers, y'all, us control freaks, you know, the ones that tend to burn out more frequently, we are the ones that struggle to let go of control. Many of us thrive on perfection, and we tend to think that no one else can do it the way we do it. So we pour ourselves into these tasks that we might despise because we're the only ones who can do it right.

Erica: News flash, honey. That's a lie. This is my chief people hat coming on. Everyone is replaceable. Everyone.

Erica: If you were in the throes of burnout or you are feeling like you're just about to burnout, you have to keep this in mind and you have to start purging, postponing, and passing the task to someone else. Now you actually have to start the task of doing the four p's, and this may take a little bit more time in the beginning. Right? If you're outsourcing cleaning your home, you may have to call a few cleaning companies. If you have no standard operating procedure written out for some of your tasks that you're planning on passing, you may have to write out how you do those things.

Erica: But you need to take the time to do that so that you can pass it off to someone else and have them start doing them. Make the time quickly by purging first. So knock those things off the list that don't need to be there so that you can start passing the other things. So real quick, some of the things that I have purged in my life have been sending holiday cards. Don't do that anymore.

Erica: No one gets a Christmas card. No one gets a New Year's card. None of that. K? Setting the table with real plates when family comes over for dinner.

Erica: I now use paper plates whenever and wherever I can. Certain team meetings, I have reduced those to biweekly from, you know, an hour to thirty minutes. And then I've also purged cooking every night. I now make sure to cook bigger meals so that we can do leftovers. Let me also say that a lot of the things you can purge are the shoulds in your life.

Erica: You know, the things that we think we have to do so that we are really doing them just to please other people, those things, cross them off the list. Now while you put the four p exercise into place, I want you to start with the second strategy, which is setting boundaries. This is a big one, but it is critical for your mental health. Boundaries that I have set have been walking away from my laptop at five without fail, shutting it down. I do not have meetings after that.

Erica: I do not do emails after that. Nothing. Nada. I have also had to remove my work email from my cell phone because I was just too tempted to always be checking that email, and that never gave me the mental space that I needed to be away from work leading to burnout. But other boundaries I have set have really been around my time.

Erica: So I don't go to every baseball practice and game like other moms do. I call myself the 80% mom because I go to 80% of the events. This has been essential for my mental health and burnout recovery, but it's also taught my son that, yes, my mom supports me, but she does get a day off and she does deserve rest. So let me ask you, what boundaries do you need to set and enforce? What is realistic for you?

Erica: Once you have those boundaries thought out, you have to communicate them. You cannot expect other people to read your mind. Now I don't know about you, but this was something that I also struggled with because I would put the boundaries into place, but then I wouldn't tell anybody what my boundaries were. Your spouse, your partner, your team, your boss, none of them can read your mind, so you have to communicate what those are. But I've got one word on setting boundaries with your boss.

Erica: Make sure that you do this in a collaborative, supportive way that communicates the need for the boundary, but also builds that solid why behind it and the solution for how you will still be getting shit done. This is a big one for people who are on the verge of burning out but don't have the luxury of quitting. And one of the things that I have done is I block my time at 03:30PM onward. Now I'm still working, but this is my time to wrap up those loose ends of the day, and it is also when my mental faculties, it's not at their best. I'm a morning person y'all.

Erica: So after my 03:30, my brain just doesn't function optimally. If I needed to communicate this to my boss, I got a really chill boss, so I'm I can do whatever I want in this space, but here is what that would look like. First, I would set up a meeting and I would say something like this. I've been thinking about how I can optimize my time and be more productive during the day. I'm so much more productive during the early hours, so I am working to shift all of my meetings to earlier in the day, and then I wanna spend the end of the day wrapping up loose ends, working on emails, and I just wanted to make sure you were good with all that.

Erica: Do you see any issues? If you have a boss that is okay with whatever you do as long as you get your job done, you end it there. Because this really should be about getting your shit done and getting it done well. But I am big on saying these boundaries out loud to who it matters because without them, people are gonna continue to put meetings on your calendar and approach you with complex problems at the end of the day if you don't. One boundary I put into place this year has been meetings without purpose.

Erica: I have attended so many meetings that have not had an agenda or have had someone else's agenda that I had no interest in, but I'm not doing that in 2024. I am much more protective of my time. And if your calendar invite doesn't have an agenda, I'm just not gonna be there. Now I once heard that Shonda Rhimes, the creator behind those amazing shows like Grey's Anatomy, has a boundary that you cannot walk into her office with a problem and no solution. She wants you to come in prepped with solutions.

Erica: I love it. But she's communicated that to everyone and they know that, so they don't show up at her office door knocking without a solution. Communicating those boundaries is key. But this brings me to some self care rituals, and this has been a game changer for me in my burnout recovery while not quitting my job. As a crazy busy working mom, I simply just don't have time for myself, or rather, I never allowed myself time for myself.

Erica: I put everyone's needs ahead of mine, and I never made time for me. Now my self care ritual is all about making time for myself. It's reading in the mornings instead of just jumping right on the treadmill. It's taking the time to go through my seven step skin care routine. It's excessive.

Erica: I know, but I love it. It's taking the dog for a longer walk at night to listen to the quiet instead of rushing back to deal with the chaos and the kids. It's telling my spouse when I need space. Now you know that self care is not selfish, but you have to make time for it. You have to plan it into your day because what gets planned gets done.

Erica: And those calendar meeting invites, those kid birthday parties, those are gonna continue to get on your calendar, and you know what's gonna get pushed? Your you time. Now one thing about self care. I don't want you filling your self care with the checklist of items that we women feel like we have to do. Self care has just become this popularized thing these days, but it's almost turned into another should.

Erica: You should make time for yoga. You should make time for meditation, long walks, exercise, and green juice. Don't get me wrong. All of that is great, and it has a place. But if you need to spend some of your self care time in your bed, eating an ice cream sundae, watching trash TV, you do you.

Erica: This self care time needs to be restorative time, whatever that looks like for you. So as I wrap up this episode with a bow, because that's what us high achieving women do, We'd like to make it nice. Just kidding. Just kidding. I love this shit.

Erica: I want you to remember that everything in that mental to do list does not have to be done by you. You can avoid total burnout, and you can survive burnout without quitting and sitting on a private island for six months, which while I'd love to do that, it just ain't feasible. Start with your mental to do list and write it all out, then start purging, passing, or postponing things as you can and perform only what you must. Then set those boundaries, both with yourself and with everyone else you need to, bosses, partners, kids, especially kids. And then weave in your self care time.

Erica: Those three strategies, that's it y'all. Three strategies are all you need to survive and recover from burnout without totally abdicating from your life, your job, and your responsibilities. Remember, friend, this journey, it is not about perfection. It is about progress. It is about those small, simple steps that you take every single day to get better.

Erica: And if you follow these strategies and you find yourself standing in that burning down house, you will be able to walk outside calmly and call the fire department. You won't feel stuck. You won't feel helpless. You'll feel empowered. Surviving burnout and burnout recovery, it's about recognizing your incredible strength, even in the moments when you feel the heat from the flame.

Erica: Girl, you have survived 100% of your bad days, and you will keep doing that. But these three strategies right here, they will make those bad days fewer and fewer and fewer. I want you to start today by creating your four p list. Brain dump it all out. Get that mental space and then start taking the steps towards balance and away from burnout.

Erica: But before you go, I have one small favor to ask. You can put this under the perform on your PPP list. If today's episode resonated with you at all, please share it with someone you know who may be in the need of hearing it today. Every share, every like, every comment, it all helps spread the message. So until next time, stop putting ceilings on what is possible and start breaking through them.