10 Signs an Entrepreneur is Headed for Burnout

As an entrepreneur, having enough motivation to get up and conquer your day is paramount to achieving big, gold goals. So what do you do if you’ve lost your mojo and can’t find enough get up and go to tackle your to-do’s?

Burnout is a stage when no matter what you do, you just don’t have the energy (or the willpower) to take on your next goal. Whether its mental or physical burnout, a business owner or leader who is feeling fatigued can start to waver in their resolve to keep pursuing even the smallest project.

There are a lot of ways that burn out manifests but if you catch it early, you can turn yourself around before your energy becomes toxic to your business.

Here are some of the warning signs:

• Your motivation is in the tank and activities that used to be exciting are ones that you now procrastinate or avoid.
• You are exhausted before lunchtime. No amount of coffee seems to help (and it’s actually making it worse.)
• When it comes to making decisions you are in an abnormal amount of confusion or overwhelm.
• You can’t imagine anything bigger than your current business. Just the idea of fitting more in makes you feel more overwhelmed.
• You get easily frustrated with your clients, colleagues or team members.
• Problems that used to roll off your back now become mountains that you worry about.
• You don’t remember why you started your business and it now feels more like a job than an extension of your passion and purpose.
• It feels like you lost your fire and you just can’t get it back.
• Instead of jumping at a new opportunity, you find yourself holding back more and more.

Fast-paced, creative entrepreneurs are highly susceptible to entrepreneur burn out. For a visionary entrepreneur, ideas are like babies –you give birth to something new and guide your idea every step of the way from a seed of possibility to fruition — which creates a major attachment to your idea.

In 2010, after hitting a rough patch, I personally went into a burnout nosedive. It was ugly. I lost my passion, lost my drive and ended up feeling completely disconnected from everything and everyone I cared about. I discovered that my stress had transitioned into a full-blown adrenal burnout that led to an auto-immune disorder that had turned my body inside out. So I had a physical reason why my burnout had derailed me. But that didn’t explain all of the emotional reasons I lost my drive.

You see when you fall in love with your vision of what’s possible it can be frustrating when it doesn’t happen fast enough. And quite frequently, the creative business owner’s identity and self-esteem gets wrapped up in the success of their business. And if you consider yourself a high-achiever who is results driven, you can feel burned out and jump ship prematurely. I had wrapped my sense of self-worth around the success of my business. And when things went sideways for awhile, I took it personally, which led to more stress, which contributed to my burnout.

I started to share more and more about my burnout from the stage in my Awaken Leadership talks. Interestingly, with all of the great leadership tips I shared, the #1 question I got from the participants was about how to recognize and heal burn out. Boom. I wasn’t alone.

A few of my friends started talking to me about their burnout. We shared ideas and commiserated on the feeling empty. I realized there was a bit of an epidemic so I talked about it on episode 24 of Amplify Your Success Podcast.

Burnout is real. But you don’t have to let it tank you if you can quickly recognize the signs and head it off at the pass.