💌 Issue 003: The burnout bible if there was one. FREE Workshop on managing stress for high performers. How to escape the busy trap, and more.

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🔍 Today at a glance:

Length: 6-ish min | Readability: Grade 7 | Word Count: 1585

• How to know when to stop. The unofficial burnout bible if there was one.

• Why you're probably feeling resentful (some quick tips)

• FREE Workshop by Dr. Alex Auerbach, performance psychologist for Toronto Raptors, executives, Olympians, Special Forces, & more!

• Weekly round-up of interesting articles, masterclasses, and more.

🧠 How to Know When to Stop

Imagine progressing the ladder to become president at Wealthfront only to end up in the emergency room with heart issues.

That's the story of Andy Johns, the former President of Wealthfront and leader at companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Quora, & more) that wrote an article around a framework that he uses to know when to stop.

Here is the framework summarized and my main takeaways:

Step 1: Define your personal range of tolerance.

Life is found everywhere on the planet, but it is not evenly distributed. That’s because life has an optimal zone to survive and reproduce. Similar to how this applies in nature, it also applies to you. Staying within a range of acceptable tolerance in your life should be the goal so that you flourish in all dimensions, not just the professional. Taking on too much pushes us into zones of intolerance, where very little life can be sustained.

When pushed outside our tolerance range, we will experience a wide range of indicators.

Andy recommends to take an inventory of your unique physiological and psychological stress responses. It can vary from biological/environmental factors to conditioning and negative beliefs, and more.

Then create a tolerance list. Read the article to understand all the details, but essentially the tolerance list will include these 3 components:

1. List of intolerables.

2. List of boundaries.

3. Plan to flourish.

Add it to a table for creating your list (example that he created). It is broken down into each major category of life to ensure that it is thorough and inclusive of a full life experience, not just our professional lives.

 Then, translate this into a tolerance target, essentially a which is a visual representation of the list you created. Here's the example that Andy shared:

Step 2: Pick your career progression.

After having an understanding of your range of tolerance, and a list of things you can do to stay within your range, consider how your broader life choices will fit into your tolerance target. 

Our careers are often defined in three stages:

• The first stage is setting a foundation in terms of getting your career started. 

• The second phase is the acceleration phase when we tend to push to climb the ladder.

• The last phase is the peak phase, where we slow things down and ride the coattails of our prior work.

Audit how often you have office/mind hours.

• Office hours are how many hours where actual work being done. 

• Mind hours are the number of hours that your mind is preoccupied with work because of the stresses of it.

Step 3: Pick your life progression.

This section is kind of amazing the way how he breaks it down. Similar to how we discussed last week in our newsletter (if you missed it, you can read it here!). Determining if you should keep climbing the ladder is partly answered by understanding what the trade-offs and consequences are. After all, the career choices you make have an impact on other facets of your life.

As high achievers, we’re conditioned to not question if we should take on more. We just put our heads down and run face-first into exhaustion without pausing long enough to ask ourselves, “What am I doing? And why am I still doing it?”

There may be times when you decide it’s necessary to expose yourself to harsher conditions. However, the main thing is you should be intentional about it—you should consciously decide when and why a wander into the intolerable makes sense.

So, before you make your next major career or life decision, pause and ask yourself a few questions. 

• How much money do I truly need to live the life I envision for myself? 

• What would I have to sacrifice if I reduced my salary in half, and would it be worth it?

• What would I need from my job in order for it to be worth the extra labor and stress?

Take a read to truly process all of the valuable wisdom he provides! 

♟ Why you're feeling resentful (Interview)

From Annie Croner, EA & Coach

As an ambitious woman that is probably handling many facets of your life and work, it is so easy to feel pushed around by your circumstances and let resentment fester.

Resentment comes as a result of saying yes when you don’t want to or because you feel you “have to”.

When you live in resentment long enough, other ramifications, such as burnout and frequent mistakes, tend to rear their ugly heads.

If you’d like to stay out of resentment, here are a few surefire ways that Annie shared:

1. Get clear on your values and set healthy parameters or boundaries around your time and energy. Values and boundaries look different for all of us. Determining what you value in your life and where your boundaries lie is crucial in living a life free of resentment.

2. Realize that holding boundaries starts with you. We train others on how we are to be treated with every interaction. If you violate your own boundaries by giving in when someone tests them, you are doing yourself a disservice. You’re also teaching others that your boundaries aren’t really what you claim they are.

3. Make time for you. In order to truly live a life you love, you need to make time for the things you love. Hobbies, rest, and recreation aren’t frivolous, they’re necessary and will serve to ground you.

If you are currently feeling resentful, get curious about why.

To learn more about Annie, please visit her website: WholeAssistant.com or connect with her on LinkedIn.

👀 Quick IG Tip:

📆 FREE Workshop: Managing Stress for High Performers

If you identify as a high performer and want to learn from the performance psychologist that trains professional athletes, Olympians, Special Forces, and executives, Dr. Alex Auerbach is offering a free workshop in preparation for his new course "Mental Fitness for Executives and Leaders." Adopt an athlete's mentality to compete at the highest level, perform consistently under pressure, & use recovery to unlock your potential. Mental fitness is applicable to nearly every industry and I think it'll be an exciting event for the community to see what insights can be applied in our everyday lives!

This event is happening on Tues, Sept 20th at 3PM PST. Register here.

👀 Weekly Finds:

• 💨 How to escape the busy trap. Sahil Bloom provides three suggestions to escape the trap of being busy: reframe, focus, and embrace boredom.

• 💪🏼 Working out after work is hard. Here's how to get motivated. Stick to your New Year's resolutions (not to mention, destress from work!) by reading this article on how to get motivated for your after-work workout.

• 🤫 What is quiet quitting? And why is it becoming popular? Quiet quitting may not be the most HR-friendly term, but when done correctly, it can help people manage burnout or, better yet, avoid it. It is a form of self care— another term that gets a bad rap — because it's an attempt to set boundaries, advocate for yourself, and create balance in your life.

• 🤓 Elaine Welteroth chats about how she strategizes work life balance. This entire masterclass is such GOLD 🏆 but hear it from the best. Elaine discusses her journey to developing her self care routine and how she may not always be a master in self-care, but she offers the tricks that have worked for her. I've listened to her entire masterclass, so let me know if you want a deep dive into the key takeaways/learnings of her masterclass!

• 🏆 How to achieve your goals with less grinding. Does achieving your goals always have to be so… hard? The answer, as you can probably tell from the title, is no. There are three things you need to move unencumbered toward your goals: a clear sense of where you are, a clear sense of where you want to be, and for there to be no conflicting goals

• 🗣How to help without being a micromanager.  We all dislike micromanagers. You can help your direct reports/teammates without micromanaging.

• 🏃🏻‍♀️ How to keep up with today's fast-paced workplace. Overloaded at work? Struggling to juggle the growing tasks on your plate? Do you feel like you have big ideas for your business, but no one to actually help you implement them? You're not alone. Read this article to read some practical tips.

Hope this week's newsletter helped and please reply to this email or submit here if you have any feedback! I'm always looking to improve and make these newsletters more useful for everyone. 

That’s it for today! See you next week 💌