Feeling like your entrepreneurial success is just a facade, masking a deep sense of burnout? This episode dives into the often-hidden epidemic of entrepreneurial burnout, exploring the disconnect between external achievement and internal well-being. In this candid conversation, Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo unravel why so many business owners and professionals, especially women, find themselves on the brink of crashing despite outward appearances of success. They dissect the societal pressures and false benchmarks that lead to unsustainable business practices, offering actionable strategies to realign with your true definition of success. Discover how to identify warning signs, shift your mindset, and ultimately create a business that not only performs well but also feels good to run day after day. If you’re ready to break the burnout cycle and build a business that serves your life instead of consuming it, this episode is for you.
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Breaking The Burnout Cycle In Your Business
Unmasking Entrepreneurial Burnout’s Hidden Struggles
Do you look successful on the outside, but feel like you’re drowning on the inside? Most of us have been there. If we are business owners or professionals, many of us who are women, or if you are doing all the right things and your business appears to be thriving, but privately, you are wondering how much longer you can keep going before you crash and burn, this episode was designed with you in mind.
Gwen and I are tackling the hidden, or I would argue not-so-hidden, epidemic of entrepreneurial burnout. It is the topic of every single business circle I am in. This is something I learned from Gwen. Success that looks good from the outside but feels unsustainable from the inside is not success. It is a countdown to burnout. Gwen and I are going to show you how to create a business that doesn’t just perform well, but actually feels good to run day after day after day. Gwen, I need you to kick us off by helping us to understand that disconnect, because you were the person who introduced me to it, this disconnect between external success markers and the experience we feel inside. Why are so many entrepreneurs finding themselves in this position where they don’t align?
Social media is not my favorite anyway. It’s fun to be able to blame social media, and I am going to blame social media to some degree, but it is not only social media. The fact that social media is always presenting that I am successful in this very specific external way, we think that is what success has to look like. We align our businesses, our activities, and all of the things to get that particular definition of success. I say it’s not only social media because sometimes it’s family pressure, sometimes it’s cultural pressure, sometimes it’s industry description kinds of pressure.
I’ve seen it in all ways where that other group has defined what success is supposed to look like. We feel like if we don’t do that, we’re not achieving success, but often, it’s not what is driving our definition of success. Most of us don’t take the time to determine what that is. The other issue around it is that external success is way easier to define. It hits those SMART goals easily, if they’re specific and they’re measurable, all of those things. I think we have the episode where I say sometimes SMART goals are dumb. It’s that thing where SMART goals are easy to measure, and so often that’s what we focus on, even though that’s not defining success for us. The classic is that if you don’t have a seven-figure business, it’s not successful. Says who? There’s my first thought.
You’re saying the disconnect comes from comparison. That’s what I heard, whether you’re comparing your reality to what people claim their reality is on social media or in other public-facing areas, you’re comparing your reality to what friends, family, and people around you say your reality should be, or you’re comparing your reality to these goals that you’re encouraged to set. I would even argue, I love the whole idea that SMART goals can be dumb, mainly because of how often we’re told, “That’s not a goal.” You’re like, “It’s the best I can do right now.” I love how it comes down to comparison.
Decoding True Success: What Resonates With You?
It’s not just the comparison. It’s the comparison against something that doesn’t resonate with you.
Here’s the honest question. How do you know? I think some of us are so ingrained. We’re so surrounded by this messaging. We don’t know that it’s not us. We don’t know that it’s not in alignment with who we are and what we want. How do we figure that piece out?
You can burn out doing what you love. Share on XI’d love to give you “All you have to do is,” and there isn’t “All you have to do is,” but the thing is, “All you have to do is” is hard. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. It is to be asking yourself, “Does this motivate me? Why does this matter to me? Why is this important? Is this lining up with the things that I say that I want in my life?”
I don’t know if I’ve shared this example here or not. I’ve shared it a lot recently, where I was having a conversation with someone, and I made up an example that I made up in my head because I know that this happens to people. She started crying because what I had described was her life and the downside of it. She was chasing the seven-figure dream because that’s what she was supposed to chase, so that she could spend more time with her kids, and the list went on and on.
She did it all during the time that the kids were home. In chasing this dream, it wasn’t the dream. What she wanted to do was to be there for her kids and spend time with them. In doing so, she was not there for her kids and did not spend time with them. She has a very bad relationship with her 20- to 30-year-old children now because they’re still resentful of her working the way that she was working to achieve this dream that she could have had if she wasn’t chasing this ethereal dream of, “I’m not successful if I don’t have seven-figure business.”
It’s so interesting because I think there are a lot of areas in life where we squander the gift of what we want in pursuit of what we really want.
Also, often what we think we’re supposed to really want.
I want to leave people with some solutions here, but I feel like before we can solve the burnout cycle, before we can say, “Here’s how to get yourself out of the burnout cycle,” the self-reflections you gave were pretty good, but also if you’re not even there yet, back to you’re so entrenched in the external messaging, you don’t even know what you know or what you feel. I’m wondering if maybe there are some symptoms that we could be looking at, some warning signs that the success we’re experiencing is unsustainable. Maybe that would be a good place to start.
Warning Signs: Is Success Unsustainable?
The first symptom, which no one talks about because it’s the nature of the symptom, is that people see me as successful. They talk to me about my success, and I don’t feel it internally for whatever reason. I say “for whatever reason” because that list can be a huge list. I’m not going to try and put it into specific categories. “I don’t feel that way. I feel like I’m an imposter, if they only knew how screwed up my life was, if they only knew how exhausted I was.”
Typically, I think this is more of a woman thing than a man thing. I’m generalizing, so not 100%. I think women are less likely to say anything because we don’t want to look ungrateful for the success that others are perceiving. If we say, “It looks great, but it’s this and this and this,” it almost sounds like, “That’s so nice, but no, it’s not that.” It sounds very self-deprecating in a not helpful way when what you’re actually saying is, “This is not success,” but it doesn’t come out like that. We don’t want to say that because it’s like we’re saying, “You see that, and you’re wrong,” and we don’t typically accept.
That’s the first one. It’s a symptom that others generally won’t see because we’re not talking about it. I think that’s the first symptom. The other symptoms, which we may be talking about some, and I know that you travel in a lot of circles so we can talk about what you’re hearing, that you’re seeing, so we’ve had enough of these conversations, I know you can see the symptoms, too, is when you don’t like your work anymore for whatever reason. When the thought of starting your day, talking to customers, whatever the things are that you do, is like, “I do not want to have to do this again,” or it’s noon on Sunday, and all you’re thinking about is, ”In less than 24 hours, I have to be back at work.”
We’re entrepreneurs. We typically design our business around something that we care about, that we love. There are days when all of us are like, “I do not want to work today,” but when it’s continual and sustained over a long period of time, that’s another symptom. What that usually means is that the business is going after something that isn’t your definition of success, and so it’s exhausting you when your energy is not there. When you’re feeling like the business is driving you and you’re not driving the business, I think that’s another sign that you’re potentially going after success that’s not your definition of success.
It's exhausting when your energy is depleted and you feel like the business is driving you, not the other way around. Share on XSay a little bit more about that.
When you feel like you have to do these things because…, “I get to do these things because…” It is a tiny different word, mindset. I’ve had people like, “I had to pay all of these people,” versus, “I get to provide jobs for all.” That is almost the exact same thing, and the situation is identical. How we’re thinking about it is very different. Where it’s like, “I’m under this pressure, I don’t know how I got here, and I don’t know why I’m doing it,” versus, “I love the fact that I have built this organization that is able to do this in a way that is creating jobs for all of these people,” as opposed to, “I’ve got mouths to feed.” Not that you don’t ever have a day where it’s like, “I’ve got mouths to feed,” but it’s constantly that versus the other.
Here’s an alternative perspective that came up in a conversation. It’s after tax season for most people. I know some people do their taxes in October, but we’re here in the spring. I’m in a business group. One person there is a former accountant, and the other people are entrepreneurs, all from varying backgrounds, some from poverty, some from success. We were talking about the big emotions that people have around taxes.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to pay more taxes than I have to. Let’s be clear here. I’m not the person who’s like, “Government, take all my money.” I don’t like it when my tax bill exceeds what I thought it would be, and I have to scramble. Every year that I owe taxes, I’m so grateful because I grew up in an environment where I never thought I would pay taxes. My mother never made enough money to owe taxes.
My friend, who’s the accountant, is always like, “I don’t like to pay the government either, but if you owe taxes, that means you made money. That means you have a real business,” versus the business owners who will spend all year long so worried about going into the next tax bracket. They actually fear success. It’s that mindset of I get to versus I have to.
Exactly. I don’t want to pay taxes, but I’m very excited that I need to pay taxes because that means the business is making money.
When you were talking about the joy piece, when you start to resent the work that you’re doing, and sometimes you’re resenting the work, sometimes you’re resenting the clients, this is something that I have seen. Among clients and peers who have been trying to reach a certain revenue threshold, maybe they can’t get beyond $5,000 or $10,000 a month, and then they get there. Once they get there, they’ve spent so long trying to hit the revenue threshold that they never stopped to think about sustaining the revenue threshold.
What you had to do to get here, chances are you can’t stop doing that if you want to stay here. They look around and they go, “I’m delivering four distinctly different types of services to five different people. That’s how I made my $10,000 a month. I can’t keep doing this.” Once they hit the $10,000, because $10,000 became the idol, they’re suddenly like, “Not only is this not sustainable because I can’t provide four distinct levels of service or types of services to five people, but $10,000 is not enough for the amount of work, time, and energy that it takes me to provide these four very distinct things to five people.” They get into that place, but I said, “I’d be happy when I hit $10,000, but I’m now a six-figure business owner.”
This is the success that we don’t talk about. It doesn’t feel successful, but now, it is successful. I don’t want to talk about that. I’m disappointed because now, that makes it look like I’m not grateful for the fact that I have it.
I want to say if you’re like, “That’s me. I’ve been working so hard to break through a revenue threshold. Now that I’m there, it doesn’t feel worth it for what I’ve had to do to be here,” we’re talking to you.
By the way, that happens at lots of thresholds. It could be $10,000, $50,000, or $100,000. There are a lot of thresholds here.
It can also be hours. This is a thing that I have dealt with. There’s a certain number of hours I want to work per week, and I’ve had to face the fact that it’s not the number of hours. It’s what I do in my hours. There are certain things I do that I would love to do 40 hours a week. There are certain things I do that, if I had to do those for twenty hours a week, I would hate every minute of the twenty hours.
It’s about the energy. It’s not about the time.
We’ve painted some pictures so that you know if we’re talking to you. Now, I’m going to ask about the consequences. What are the consequences of staying in this place too long? I know from prior episodes, Gwen, that you have seen that there are physical consequences, emotional consequences, and sometimes relationship consequences. I know you’ve talked about that quite a bit. Marriages fall apart, or even friendships can fall apart. That diminishing return on effort, we’ve already talked about loss of purpose and loss of passion. Maybe walk us through that whole thing, these consequences of living in this space of unsustainability for too long.
Avoiding The Entrepreneurial Burnout Cycle
The first thing is, if you’re in this unsustainable place, usually, you want to try and fix it. The problem is that most people try and fix the wrong thing, which doesn’t help the issue. We start blaming more of the wrong thing for the problem. Going back to the example that we were talking about, we think, “If I hit a $10,000 a month, it’s all going to be fine.” We find out it’s not, and so it’s like, “It must be a $20,000 a month.” You hit a $20,000 a month, and that’s not fine. “It’s a $ 30,000-a-month.” No, because probably none of this is actually about the money, but we keep trying to fix the money. The more we fix the money, we keep getting there.
That’s where we get to where we talked about at the intro of our show and where we started. People say, “I’m going to burn the whole thing down and start over.” That’s a bad choice because most of the time, one of two things is going to happen. First, either you’ve lots of assets that you didn’t need to lose in the burning down. That’s one. The other is that the business you rebuild often has so many similarities that you end up getting burned out, and you need to burn it down.
I was going to say, you burn down and rebuild the same business over and over.
One of the biggest consequences is that you get yourself into a burnout cycle. You get excited about the new thing, and I’m starting fresh. You get all of those things, you get to the stage, you burn yourself out, and we go around. To me, that’s the biggest piece that I hate seeing because that’s so completely avoidable. It’s because we’re trying to fix the wrong thing in the wrong way. It’s often because we think it’s around a success goal that’s not our definition of success. The more we keep chasing that same success goal, we’re going to keep having the same problem.
That to me is one of the biggest issues because with all of those things, we have all of the other issues. We have the health issues, we have the relationship issues, we have the energy issues, because we keep hitting this burnout thing again and again. To me, the bigger problem is understanding why we are burning out and what is driving the burnout. What is the root cause of the burnout, not what is the symptom?
We’re going to talk a little bit about that. Before we do, I want to share with our audience that we have an assessment and action guide for those of you who are going, “Not only is that me, but I’m done. I want to break the burnout cycle, and I need to break it for once and for all.” We have that. If you go to TheBusinessYouReallyWant.com/Burnout, you’ll be able to download that. Gwen, since you provided such a beautiful segue for us into talking about breaking the cycle, tell me what the first step is.
Loving Your Work But Still Burning Out
The first step is to understand that you can burn out while doing what you love.
I don’t like that, Gwen. No, I do not like that.
I know, it’s part of why we work well together is that I say hard things.
I pout, and you put up with me.
Exactly, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s true.
I go, “Yes, but I need a moment to pout and whine.” You go, “Okay, I’ll be here when you’re done.”
Anything done beyond what our energy supports will burn us out, even if it’s something that we love. What we believe in our head is because we love it, our energy will continue for it at an unlimited pace. That’s not true. That’s usually one of the first paths we hit in burnout. “I love this. I can do it all the time. I don’t have to do this for eight hours a day. I can do it ten and twelve hours a day because I love this. I love my clients. I love what I do. I can keep doing this.”
Anything done beyond what our energy supports will burn us out, even if it's something we love. Share on XNo, you can’t, because at some point, it may not be this week, it may not be next week, it may not be next month, and it may not even be this year. At some point, that’s going to burn you out because the energy is going to run out for it. When the energy runs out, then we start resenting all of it. When it starts running out, then the burnout hits fast. That’s why a lot of people get surprised by burnout because they were doing what they love. How could I possibly get burned out?
People who manage online communities do suffer burnout, like first responders, medical providers, and people in the healthcare field do. What I have discovered is that in all those fields, there is a precursor to burnout that, if you could identify it, sometimes you can stop it before it begins, and that’s compassion fatigue.
How I see compassion fatigue manifest in business is that things that used to feel like no sweat suddenly are deal breakers. They are things that send you on an F-bomb rant for minutes after minutes. You’re mad. You’re pounding the keyboard in emails. This person has always asked these kinds of questions. They’ve always said these things. This client has always made those kinds of requests, and they’ve never been a problem before, but suddenly, they are the straw that broke the camel’s back. I think that tells you better than anything else that you are on a fast track to burnout, no matter what it is you’re doing.
I would agree.
Do you have any others?
One of the others is, and it’s related, but it’s a little different, how do I feel about my work? You touched on it in this example that you gave, which is early on, it’s like, “I love my customers. They’re wonderful.” Do you still love all of your customers in the exact same way? Every time that you’re going to get on a call or interact with them in any way, do you say, “Yay, I get to,” or it’s like, “Harriet, she’s going to be there?” If you started getting one or two, then the question is, did you change, or did they change? Most of the time, it’s us.
It’s because their behavior isn’t quite as aligned as you’d like it to be, and back to this is part of that compassion fatigue. It starts showing up earlier with one or two people. You start seeing it early. It’s like, “I can’t with so and so,” or it can be the event that happens pretty consistently, and it’s like, “I don’t want to have to deal with that ever again.” Same thing, where it’s not universal, it’s when this doesn’t feel like it used to feel before. I think one of the other places that we get into burnout, and it’s partly a symptom because it’s part of watching, is not realizing that the rest of our lives are also impacting our work life.
An example, because I was having this conversation with one of our clients, her little boy is about to start going to school. That’s going to change her energy. It might give her more energy. It might give her less energy. There are all sorts of things. Often, we burn out not because of the business, but because we don’t have the same energy to put into the business, because of the other things that are taking our energy. We forget to look at that.
It’s interesting you point that out because not only do we forget to look at that as business owners, but I think we forget to look at that as professionals, too. It reminds me of an administrator who works at one of the schools that one of my kids goes to. They were the person who volunteered for every event. “I’ll work the night event. I’ll be in charge of this. I’ll be in charge of that.” Their wife had a baby last year.
I’d ask them, “How are things going?” They said, “I’m volunteering for a lot less extra stuff.” I said, “Really?” They were very quick to be like, “I still love the kids. I’m still committed to the job. I’m committed to the school 100%, but other things seem to be more important now.” I’m like, “That does happen.” It’s not one of those things where I would have ever said to somebody who was expecting a child that that was going to happen to them, but when they said it, instantly memories flood back, and I go, “I remember when I went through that. That’s why I’m an entrepreneur.”
One of the other things is that we try to always pin burnout on the business, but it may not be the business that’s burning you out. It’s that the energy that you had to put into the business isn’t as much of it. The business may be burning you out, but it’s not the business’s fault. You haven’t shifted enough to allow the business to be successful at this particular moment in time, stage in life, activities going on, whatever the case may be.
We’ve talked about a variety of ways that burnout can manifest. We then started to talk a little bit about how you get your way out of it. I appreciate the fact that you said the first step is understanding and accepting that you can burn out doing things you love. I’d like to take us one more step forward and say, “I’m here, I’ve made that recognition.” What are one to two things that I could do to start to redirect the ship, restructure the business, so I’m headed toward the path of sustainability?
I think the other thing is we all think we’re going to recognize this, wake up tomorrow, and it’s all going to be better. We’re going to draw a line in the sand, we’ll have made one different decision, and it’s smooth sailing from here into retirement. Maybe that’s somebody’s experience, but that has never been my experience.
Define Success For Your Current Season
That could be true if retirement is two or three months away, but back to too many variables. There are too many variables for it to sustain over time, back to there are other things that are affecting how we’re perceiving burnout or not that are not necessarily directly related to the business. The first thing that I would say is you do have to get clear on what you want success to be for you right now in this space and time. Everyone talks about the ten-year, the twenty-year, the BHAG, or whatever, which is useful because that gives us a direction that we want to head, but if we aren’t aware of where we are now and what we need now, then we’re jumping off from an inappropriate spot.
Great that I want to have this business, but where am I now, and what can I realistically do, want, expect now, given all of the things? One of the things that comes out in Nic Peterson’s book, Bumpers, is that he talks about what the things are that you can do that completely line up with the thing that is your definition of success. Using my previous example, she was working all the time and not spending time with her kids, so that she could have a life and spend more time with her kids. What she could have done is spend more time with the kids.
What are the things that you can do right now that start lining up with that success? Once you start doing that, that will ease a whole lot of the burnout pretty quickly because you’re going to start feeling successful in the way that you feel successful. I had a client who says, “What I want is an afternoon, once a week, where I can sleep, I can watch smutty TV, I can do whatever before the kids and the husband get home, but that would be during the workday, and I can’t do that.”
I said, “What do you mean? Why not? What if you plan that that’s what you were going to do?” “But I can’t.” I said, “Try it for a month, try four days, next week, week after, and let’s see what happens.” What she discovered was that she had so much better energy that she was way more productive during all of those other hours by throwing away, as it were, four hours in a week. That made the other 90% way more productive. The 10% loss of time created an increase in productivity, and she was feeling better about her business.
What does success mean to us, and can we start doing that now? What can we do now? As soon as we start feeling that success, some of that overwhelm, some of this stress, some of these other things will start to drop. It’ll also help us start lining up with the things that we want to continue to do, because I think burnout is a whole lot about energy more than anything else. How do we do the things that start creating energy for us? I’m not just talking about self-care, not that self-care shouldn’t be a thing, but a lot of people try to fix burnout with just self-care, but having self-care doesn’t feel like success, probably still doesn’t fix the problem.
If your definition of self-care isn’t really self-care, but getting an annual mammogram, that’s also not going to fix burnout.
If your definition of self-care isn't truly self-care—it's merely like getting an annual mammogram, and that's all—it's not going to fix burnout. Share on XPart of it is also knowing what it does for you. One of my clients loves having a massage. “I don’t like a massage, but I like to do the whole sensory deprivation chamber float thing.” She tried it once, and it made her sick. There’s no answer. It’s about figuring out what the thing is for us that feels like success. I could say, “It would be nice to be able to do that once a week, but it’s an hour and a half away for me to do that, so I’m not going to do that,” or I could say, “No, I’m going to take time to do it.” You know I take time to do it. I don’t do it every week, but I would like to do it. I don’t have time to do it every week, but I do it pretty much twice a month. I choose to start doing the thing I want for the future now.
Exactly. Thank you for summing it that succinctly, because too often, the default is to say, “I want to do the thing,” and as soon as I get to the other side, as soon as this happens and that happens, time will be there. It’s like saying, “I want to workout for an hour a day,” so as soon as I get a spare hour a day, I’ll go to the gym, when anybody who has ever committed to fitness and sustained it can tell you that it started off by making the commitment, booking the hour a day, and then doing it. The hour doesn’t magically appear.
It was saying, “The first thing I’m going to do is get up and walk around the block.”
You have to start doing the thing and let everything else follow around it. You can’t wait for everything else to make space.
It’s not going to happen.
We have talked about how burnout comes from this disconnect between what may look successful but doesn’t feel successful, that lack of sustainable success. We’ve talked about the symptoms. We’ve talked about the consequences. We’ve talked about some good, practical steps on starting to make your way out of it. I am wondering, because earlier you had referenced measurements of success, if SMART goals and maybe revenue goals are not the best ways to measure success, what are some alternatives?
Measuring Success Beyond Revenue Goals
First, as a business owner, you always need to have a revenue goal because it is part of what business is about, but when you hang all of your success on that revenue goal without knowing why that revenue goal matters to you, that’s where we end up having some issues. Beyond that, I always start when people have a revenue goal, “Why that particular revenue goal? What does that mean to you?” There’s almost nobody who is Scrooge McDuck who just wants the gold pile that they’re swimming through.
Hanging all your success on a revenue goal without understanding its true importance is where issues arise. Share on XThe money itself is not the thing. The money is a vehicle, a tool in their mind, for something else. Whether it’s vacations, time with children, or bigger houses, it doesn’t matter. I’ve got no judgment on what that is, but what is the money? It’s paying for college, it’s paying for private schools, whatever, it doesn’t matter. What is the why behind the money is one of the first things. That starts getting us closer to what matters to us. Going back to the example I gave earlier, this gal was like, “I love a good nap and being able to watch whatever I want on Netflix and not have to care what anybody else is wanting to watch.” You should be able to experience that.
It does mean that you’re going to have to take time out of your day. What does that mean? Maybe you have to work more at some other time. You may have to give and take, but does that make you happy? If it makes you happy, then let’s figure out how we say that is okay to be part of how I’m defining success, that I get to do whatever this thing is. Part of that is knowing when I feel good about all of the things for myself, not because I’ve done this for my husband, I’ve done this for my child, I’ve done this for my spouse, or I’ve done this for my wife. Not that, but for myself. What feels good for myself?
You then say, “How do I start measuring how I feel good?” I know I love being in, on, and around water. I’m turning over here to my planner because I have a goal that talks about that I will float, swim, paddleboard, be in the water, be around the beach, two, three, or four times a week. That’s my good, better, best goal. I have it as a goal. It’s measurable. How many times was I in and around the water? It’s a very measurable thing because we live in the center of a desert.
You have to work at that.
It’s not just a default situation. It’s a goal for me because I know when I’m doing that, I feel better. I also have a meditation goal. How many times do I meditate in the morning? I know I do better when I meditate in the morning. It’s one that I have to work at a little bit more. It’s not quite as satisfying, but I know I do better for it. It allows me to stay more centered and to be more pleasant for my clients, which is what I want. I want to be super present for my clients.
Part of this is setting goals that are also related to the other aspects. I don’t have kids, you have kids. One of your goals, I happen to know, is that you are able to do kid drop-off and pick-up on a pretty consistent basis. You aren’t having to have other people do kid drop-off. That becomes a goal, and it becomes part of a business goal.
That means I’m going to design my business in such a way that I can do that even when we have early pick-up, half days, and all the other things that I know you have to deal with, because we talk about it on a regular basis. It’s setting those as goals and saying, “Am I hitting the goal that matters to me right now?” Of course, designing your life so that your business is successful enough so that you can do kid pick-up and drop-off when your youngest is a senior in high school is not that useful because you’ve missed all of it up until then.
What I’m hearing is that creating a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside is possible.
Creating a business that feels as good internally as it appears externally is possible, though it might not look successful to others, and you must be okay with that. Share on XIt also may not look successful to anybody else, and you have to be okay with that.
You have to say something. I was going to say something else, but you’ve got to go with that.
I’m going to pick on you for a minute.
Why not? I’m an easy target.
I know enough about you and your business that I can pick on you. There would be people who, if they looked at your business, would say, “Her business isn’t successful. She’s not at this level of revenue. She’s not doing this. She’s working these hours.” There are all sorts of things, but that’s not true for you because you’re making some very specific choices around those things so that you’re achieving your real definition of success. If you got caught up in other people saying, “That’s not successful. You should be making X amount by this time,” then you’re going to feel not successful from other people’s definition.
You have to say, “Nope, I know that my definition is my definition of success.” For example, I could never possibly understand it because I don’t have kids. I don’t have any interest in doing pick-up and drop-off. It’s knowing that it’s okay that I don’t understand your definition of success. I’m completely okay with it. That’s the other thing. As soon as we get worried about how other people are comparing us or how they’re comparing them to us, we’re going to lose. Two completely different individuals.
What you’re saying is that a business that feels as good on the inside as it looks on the outside requires intentional choices. What I heard is boundaries. I want to say sometimes difficult, but personally, for me, always difficult boundaries and a willingness to measure success differently, maybe differently than you have in the past, but differently than others do around you.
It’s definitely what you’re seeing in the ether out there. That’s a very generic definition of success. It is not specific.
If you do it, the reward is, I hate to rob from the show’s title, but you build the business you want, which serves your life rather than consuming your life, because all of us, that’s what we want from success.
Yeah, it is. Why do this if you’re miserable?
Why do this, indeed, Gwen? I’ve asked myself that several times over the years. Our time is up. If you recognize yourself in our conversation, you want to transform your business, and you want something that supports your wellbeing while still delivering excellent results by your definition, I can’t recommend anything more than a little self-reflection. We have an assessment and an action guide to support you in doing that. It is called Breaking the Burnout Cycle, and to access that, go to TheBusinessYouReallyWant.com/burnout. Details are there, and you can get that free in your email. We’ll see you next time.
Mentioned in This Episode
- Breaking the Burnout Cycle
- SMART Goals are Dumb (prior episode)
- Are Your Business Goals Sabotaging Your Success (prior episode)
- Setting Realistic Goals to Boost Your Productivity (article)
- Bumpers by Nic Peterson — free PDF version or buy it on Amazon
- Everyday Effectiveness on YouTube
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
