Beyond Burnout: Navigating Stress and Sustaining Success

**SPEAKER_2** (0:04)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection, and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Hello and welcome back to the show. I'm Stephen Sakach here with Tullio Siragusa and Ash Maher once again.
You know what's better than talking about work? Talking about how work makes us feel when we never want to work again. So we're going there today. It's all about burnout. It's the adult report card that nobody wants. We're going to try and bring some good vibes to the topic and focus on positively managing it, but we've got to dive into the tough stuff here too.
So in 2019, the World Health Organization officially recognized burnout as an occupational phenomenon. They described it as a syndrome resulting from chronic work plague stress that has not been successfully managed. So we'll get into how to successfully manage it. As you may recall, our last episode on self-actualization, we talked a little bit about the future of the workplace, mentioned more time spent on personal growth and why that will be the case, we think in the future and offshoot of this topic that we didn't really fully dive into is just burnout. Good leadership is going to focus on the many areas where this can pop up and there's a lot. So you have your hands full. Guys, let's start talking about a start with this Simon Sinek quote. He says, working hard for something we don't care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion.
Ash, what are your thoughts on this quote?

**Ash Maher** (1:55)
Oh, man. So when I think about this quote, I think back to the time where I was killing myself for something that I thought was going to be my road to self-actualization, but it was something I was sold on. And essentially I ended up just being extorted for whatever talents I had, which was just my ability to show up to work and work really hard and solve problems, you know. And now I find that I'm able to, and now that I'm in an environment where I'm able to actually focus on things I care about, I find that when I wake up with that twinkle in my eye, my excitement for life is because really my passion is not so much the work I'm doing specifically, but the impact that my work does. And having that excitement and the impact and knowing the feedback that you get back from that impact, that just makes me super, super excited to be alive. I feel like I'm actually playing a part in the bigger picture. And I feel like this is my art, really, just to be able to express myself this way and my art is to be able to solve people's problems and keep the world going. So when you're focused on the thing that you love to do, I think you tend to figure out ways, I think your energy tends to be a lot higher, I think tend to be on a higher vibrational force than anything. And you know how to go ahead and move around and navigate a little bit better to make sure you're taking care of yourself along the way.
But with that said, if you're just doing busy work all day and you're not able to actually get to that point of self-actualization, I've been there and it's a dark place. I remember the worst thought I had in my head, and I think this was back in 2017 I was in a dark office, it was Friday night, I was doing some admin related work when I thought I was going to become like this person that was going to grow and learn from my mentor, and so I was doing their busy work. And I remember telling myself, like, oh my gosh, if I walk out of this office and die, then every decision I made in my life up to this point was wrong.
That was a very dark place to be. But anyways, I'm going to end on that.

**Stephen Sakach** (3:49)
Start off with the darkness. Like I said, this is going to get a little tough.
I think what was interesting there is that we've mentioned this in the past podcasts is kind of almost that change of, you know, from the busy work to the actual impact that your work does, you know, the service you are to others.
And even just having a little bit of a change in how you view things, you know, is like, oh, yeah, no, I'm not just doing all this work. This is going to help this person to do X, Y and Z. And you just see that higher purpose in what you do. I definitely think that's that's kind of a huge deal.