Burn out.  It’s the unsung hero of many an entrepreneur’s downfall….and that ain’t a good thing!

Burn out is the secret enemy, that emerges when our need and desire to ‘do it all’ or ‘be perfect’ is taking center stage.

Burn out is something that entrepreneurs in particular need to start paying more attention to, otherwise it will literally come up and bite you in the ass.

What makes entrepreneurs burn out?

In a Harvard Business Review What Makes Entrepreneurs Burn Out article that had researched over 300 entrepreneurs they found the following:

The obsessively passionate entrepreneurs reported feeling that work was more emotionally draining and that working all day required a great deal of effort. They indicated feeling frustrated by their work and even that it was breaking them down. For some entrepreneurs, their burnout caused a constant state of anxiety and stress. We also found that among entrepreneurs with obsessive passion, those with a fixed mindset were even more prone to burnout.

If you found yourself nodding your head at any of those symptoms, or if that resonated with you, please read on and listen into this podcast episode!

My experience of burn out

I first experienced what burnout felt like on my 2013 Suitcase Entrepreneur Book Tour through the US and Canada.

I had been obsessing about this book and its launch for months. I had been doing endless marketing, PR, interviews and community building around it.

I was riding high on all the goodwill and attention because, deep down, I really wanted this book to impact a LOT of people.

It all worked – it became a No #1 Bestseller on Amazon in three categories and to date has sold over 30,000 copies and thousands of audio books.

But, it worked at the detriment of my health in the form of experiencing burnout and having two friends catching it, before it took me down.

Elise and Karley, my dear friends in Vancouver (in the photo below), who helped me on my grand finale book event, realized I was running on empty and simply not slowing down.

They forced me to leave my devices behind, disconnect, and come and join them in the park to eat fish and chips and simply sit and watch the sunset.

That was my saving grace and sparked my road to recovery, I kid you not!

So was my dear friend Cathy Goddard who let me stay in her apartment so I could hide away, do my work but also, finally, rest up.

Strike forward 6 years and I found myself unexpectedly (although had I read the signs it would have been no surprise) feeling burned out.

What does that feel like, you may ask?

Not fun, not fun at all.

You are so lethargic you can’t do anything. Everything takes effort. It hurts to think. You overreact to the smallest things. You’re emotional. You really are good for nothing.

What it requires?

Rest, sleep, more rest and zero responsibility. In fact there are many things you can do to avoid and overcome burn out and ensure that you look after YOU – the most important thing in your world.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• 5 ways to spot that you’re heading for burnout
• How the body and mind responds to stress
• 6 key ways to recover from burnout and heal yourself

Podcast Resources

The Insights Timer Course I refer to: Protect Your Body From Daily Stress – Linda Hall

Kathryn Curzon – my wonderful friend who kindly shared her tips for dealing with burnout

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What’s the best way to build a thriving online business?

According to Shane Melaugh, CEO and co-founder of Thrive Themes, there are three key ingredients.

At first glance, they seem deceptively simple, and in many ways they are.

1. You need to have a great offer
2. You need traffic to your website
3. You need a website that converts

Yet actually focusing on them and implementing them is where most entrepreneurs fall down.

This has been something Shane has tapped into from the get go, helping and teaching entrepreneurs how to do these 3 things well.

In fact he’s done what so many entrepreneurs do, which is to create a solution to a problem they’re having, since no one else seems to be doing it well.

Often our biggest frustrations are the best source of a new product or service idea.

Not that you’re your own ideal customer, but typically, and once you validate your assumptions, many other people often are having the same struggle or problem too, and want it solved.

Not an Overnight Success Story

For Shane, he realized early on when he was taking courses and learning as fast as he could, what it took to build an online business, that most courses he was taking sucked.

He also felt the people teaching them weren’t sharing the right information, or what they were teaching was out of date.

So he created his own online course back in 2010 about SEO which he sold 2,000 copies of and made six figures of revenue from!

But he’s quick to point out, it wasn’t an overnight success story.

This actually happened over the course of 2 years with the first launch of his course only making a few dozen sales.

What I appreciate most about Shane, is he’s one of the few male online marketers who’s not a BS artist and really tells it like it is.

That is, that the reality of building a successful business usually takes years and LOTS of trial and error before actually reaching your big lofty dreams and goals.

Problem Solving is the Best Way to Learn

Back in 2010 when he launched his course, Shane didn’t have the awesome platforms we have today that are all-in-one and let you create, sell, and host an online course without the technical headache like Podia.

Instead, he built his first course on a WordPress website that he had to heavily customise to act as his course area with added membership access.

He knew that in order for his business to thrive, he had to overcome obstacles and DO the complicated and difficult stuff.

Once he had, he was in a much better position to create his own solution to his problem in the form of, the highly successful Thrive Themes, which includes blazingly fast WordPress templates and plugins, built to get more traffic, more subscribers and more customers.

From there he’s gone on to continue to build excellent products to help online entrepreneurs thrive, and release fantastic free content as well as regular and amazing courses.

In this episode you’ll learn:

• How to grow your business online
• Why it’s better to be stumbling forward than to be sitting paralysed
• Why overnight success isn’t realistic and what you should be aiming for instead
• Shane’s 3 ingredients for a thriving online business
• How Thrive Themes can help you build a high converting website

Podcast Resources

Learn more about Shane and all the ways he gets paid to be him.

Check out Thrive Architect, which I use on this very website and start making high converting landing pages and beautiful websites. And watch my vlog on it below:

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