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Effortlessly Productive
Welcome to Effortlessly Productive with Annie Veblen McCarty, where we dive into the art and science of mastering your time and boosting your productivity without the burnout.
Join Annie as she explores practical tips, strategies, and mindset shifts to help you streamline your tasks, prioritize effectively, and get more done with less stress.
Whether you're juggling work, family time, or just trying to find more time for what matters most, our conversations will empower you to work smarter, not harder.
Tune in and discover how to make productivity not just a goal, but a way of life!
Effortlessly Productive
Feeling Fried? Here's What Burnout Really Looks Like in Business!
Burnout doesn't always look like quitting your business to embark on a decade-long yoga retreat. For many high-achieving entrepreneurs, it manifests in subtle ways you might not recognize until you're deep in the weeds. As someone who identifies as an overachiever and natural hustler, I discovered my burnout showed up as peculiar patterns that I initially dismissed as personality quirks.
Do you find yourself creating endless launch plans only to pivot at the last minute? Perhaps you're working diligently behind the scenes while completely avoiding social media visibility. Maybe you've abandoned the very practices—meditation, journaling, breathwork—that once kept you grounded. These aren't simply indecision or procrastination; they're warning signals your body and business are sending before complete collapse.
Throughout this episode, I share my personal journey with entrepreneurial burnout, revealing the hidden symptoms I experienced and the practices that brought me back. From meditation and voice work to EFT (tapping) techniques, discover practical tools to reconnect with your body and business purpose. You'll learn why building sustainable systems is ultimately the best prevention—allowing your business to scale without demanding every ounce of your energy. If you've been feeling stuck, disconnected, or caught in loops of indecision, this conversation might be exactly what you need to recognize and heal the burnout you didn't know you had. Connect with me to share your burnout experience or grab the System Seer Playbook with its complete Burnout Resurrection section at thesystemseer.com.
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Coaches, healers and creatives how much money are you leaving on the table? Coachos is the world's leading all-in-one software that automates your business, scales your income and replaces all your other softwares for a fraction of the cost. Grab your free trial now at the link in the show notes.
Speaker 2:Hey, this is Annie Veblen-McCarty and I'm gonna teach you how to be effortlessly productive. I've been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and I got sick and tired of experts preaching what business and life should look like and what I should be doing as a leader and to turn a profit, only to find myself wasting time, burned out, feeling inauthentic and still not making any money. On this show, we are ditching the shoulds. I'm giving you permission to do business differently. As a certified master coach, I believe that everything you need to have success and build the life and business of your dreams is already living on the inside. I'm gonna empower you to lean into what you do best, help you see your path forward clearly and give you the strategy and action steps along the way to become effortlessly productive. Let's dive in. Welcome to today's episode of Effortlessly Productive.
Speaker 2:Have you ever experienced burnout? I know that I, especially in the entrepreneurial world, have heard so many people talk about burnout, about that feeling fried, about all the things that go along with burnout, and jokingly talking about entrepreneurs who have hit that burnout stage and they go on that like 10-year yoga retreat and you never see them again. They never come back to their business because they worked so hard for so many years and they literally just fried themselves and while that definitely can be a sign that somebody has hit burnout, where they literally peace out on their business and just don't really ever come back to it there are lots of hidden signs of burnout that a lot of people aren't aware of and I was definitely not aware of this. For me, burnout looked like a little bit different than a lot of people. I am an overachiever, I am a hustler at heart. I will work and work and work and work, and while those are definitely things that lead to burnout, for me burnout did not look like completely piecing out of my business or wanting to quit. I had some other signs of burnout that I want to share with you.
Speaker 2:So some of my signs of burnout of what I hit and I didn't even realize that this was burnout was I would get stuck in these loops of indecision where I was like I'm going to launch this program and then I would work on that launch and I would have everything ready to go and at the last minute I would decide that I wanted to launch something else and I would just kind of go in these loops or these cycles of creating all the backend and being ready to launch and then being like, oh wait, no, I have this other idea that I really want to do, and for me, especially when I was stuck in these loops, it did not really feel like burnout, because I was actually excited about what I wanted to launch. I was doing the work behind the scenes, but when it came to actually launching I would change my mind over and over and over again, and that was actually a hidden sign of burnout that I didn't even realize. So if that sounds familiar, it might not be that you just don't know what to do with your business, or you can't decide, or you're wishwashy, or you're somebody who just changes their mind a lot. That can actually be a sign of burnout. Another sign of burnout for me was that I would just stop posting on social media, and for me this again was very sneaky because I was doing all these other things in my business. I was working with clients, I was creating a lot of stuff in the background, I was doing a lot of stuff on Canva.
Speaker 2:As a buffering technique. Buffering is where you are doing something to avoid a specific emotion, so I often buffer with work activities. So it feels like I'm busy, but it's something that's maybe not the most important thing in my business or moving the needle forward, and what is really happening is that you're actually avoiding feeling a certain way right by doing these other activities. So for me, a lot of what that looks like was I would be working really hard Again, I'd be creating graphics, I would be recording podcast episodes, I would be creating stuff for my clients, I'd be creating new programs all these ideas but I was not present on social media, I was not posting, I was not showing up Anything that required me to really be visible and visible on a consistent basis. I was avoiding that avoidance of a whole area of business. And it's not to say that you have to post on social media, but social media had always been a way that I use quite effectively to market myself and market my business and to find new clients, and I found myself completely avoiding it.
Speaker 2:I did eventually recognize that that was a sign of burnout and I think part of it was. I had been in this loop for so long of putting the pressure on myself and following advice that I had been given. That maybe wasn't the best advice of you have to post three times a day. You have to create 10 to 15 stories a day, so I was following all of this guidance. That was very out of alignment for myself, but what that led to was that burnout, right Of trying to keep up with this schedule that was not in alignment with me, did not feel good to me, was not the best use of my energy, and, rather than finding a system that worked well for me and was sustainable, I just completely peaced out and again, that was a huge sign of burnout that I experienced.
Speaker 2:Another sign of burnout for me was actually dissociating from my body and what that means. When you hear people talk about dissociation, that means that I was not paying attention to how I actually felt in my body. I was just staying up in my head, I was just thinking of that to-do list, the next thing to do, the next thing to do, the next box to check, and I was never really checking in with how I felt, how I felt in my body. A lot of what this dissociation looked like was all of these rituals. I had a lot of things that I would go to like. There was a spell where I meditated every single day, and what I didn't realize was in those meditation sessions I was actually really going into my body and paying attention to how I felt and honoring that and not just trying to push through but sitting with it and working through the tough emotions, working through the sensations that I was feeling. And when I started to dissociate, what I did was I actually dropped all of those things that helped me tune into myself and how I was feeling.
Speaker 2:So meditation was an example Journaling I used to journal all the time and I just completely stopped to that. Even things just like as simple as pulling a card from an Oracle deck or lighting a candle and taking a minute to breathe deeply and just again check into myself. I completely eliminated a lot of that and it brought about that dissociation from myself and my body. But it also meant that I was not tapping into a lot of rituals that I use as a means of regulation, and the more and more I did that, the more and more dysregulated I got. Then that was turning into a lot of wobble energy in my business and in my life, and what that also meant was that burnout hit even faster. I wasn't actually regulating that. I was doing things that led to more and more burnout, which it was a vicious cycle. As you can tell I think I've used the word cycle quite a number of times these things feed themselves right.
Speaker 2:So I wanted to talk about some other signs of burnout that maybe you are experiencing or you have experienced in the past that are kind of sneaky signs of burnout that you might not realize are actually burnout, but just things to pay attention to. That could be a sign that you are dabbling in that burnout or you've been in burnout in the past. So a big one, which I did talk a little bit about with my social media, is going into hiding where you maybe are doing work. Right, we're doing work in the background, but we don't want that visibility. We're actually hiding from being present with other people and being present on social media, maybe being present with our email list. We're actually hiding from being present with other people and being present on social media, maybe being present with our email list. We're hiding from those interactions with other, stuck. That is a huge sign that you could be experiencing some burnout.
Speaker 2:And often this comes with inaction, right, that feeling of I know what to do but I'm not doing it. And I feel stuck. And because I'm not doing the things, I'm actually creating more stuckness. That whole spiral, that whole loop can be a sign of burnout, the indecision. So this taps into what I shared about launching and being like I'm going to launch this program and getting all excited and building all the things and then the very last minute, you're like, oh wait, but there's this other thing that I really want to do, and it can be sneaky because it can mask itself right. You can actually be excited about these ideas, but then, when it comes to actually doing the thing, we enter this phase of indecision where we're like, oh, I had this idea, but I'm actually going to shift to this other one, I'm actually going to shift to this other one that can actually be a sign of burnout.
Speaker 2:If you have ever felt suffocated, like you can't breathe, like you are just being crushed by your business, by things going on in life, if you've ever experienced some depression and this is not to say that there isn't clinical depression that you need to treat, but depression can actually be a side effect it can be a sign of burnout and then that dissociation that I talked about. If you have ever felt like you were very disconnected from yourself from your mission, from why you started this in the first place, even dissociated from the other people around you, right, dissociated from your clients, that feeling that you're not connected into your clients, into groups or masterminds that you're a part of those can all be sneaky signs of burnout. So what do we do if we are experiencing burnout and when I say burnout, yes, this can be taken to the very extreme, like I talked about going on that 10-year yoga retreat where you literally just peace out from your business and don't come back. That would be a very extreme sign. Another extreme sign would be not being able to get out of business bed, where you're so burned out you literally can't even take that next step. But it can also be those smaller things. So maybe you're experiencing just a couple of little signs. So what do we do?
Speaker 2:Some of the biggest things that we can do in order to come back from that burnout and really start to heal that. Whether, again, we're in a more extreme case of it, or maybe we just are like dabbling and maybe it's not an everyday thing, but maybe you're having a week where you're like, oh, I am just kind of done. I really feel disconnected from my mission, feel disconnected from my clients. How can we start to heal that? So one of the best ways that you can heal that is again. So one of the best ways that you can heal that is, again, these things that help us tap back into ourselves. That can look like doing meditation, where we're spending some time just sitting with ourselves and sitting with our feelings. Another really fun thing that you can do is using your voice right and feeling that voice. Actually spending the time to like feel that voice moving through you, and whether that's you are like saying a mantra over and over or even just singing, doing that kind of thing can actually help us get back into our body and help us dissipate some of that burnout that we may be experiencing Another one of my go-tos.
Speaker 2:So if you have ever heard of EFT or tapping, that is a really, really good way to combat burnout. If you are curious about that, reach out to me. I love taking people through tapping sessions and often create tapping scripts for people. So that is one of my most favorite fun things. And if you are wanting to take all of this to the next level, just a little mention.
Speaker 2:So my system seer playbook actually has an entire section called the burnout resurrection, and it leads you through some of these practices and how to bring yourself back, goes even deeper into what these signs of burnout look like and then how to heal yourself from that, how to bring yourself back, and these are things that we also need to be aware. This is not like a one and done like oh, I did my meditation. Burnout is gone forever. No, there are going to be times in your business where you go through business and you're totally fine and you're not experiencing that burnout at all, and then you may have times where you are kind of dabbling there right on that edge, where you're kind of dipping in and out, and those are the best times before it gets to the point where we can't get out of bed or we just want to peace out and leave our business forever. Can't get out of bed, or we just want to peace out and leave our business forever.
Speaker 2:We can do these little practices that are going to help us heal that burnout, return to ourselves, reassociate with our body. So if you are looking for some more tools, if you are wanting to experience EFT, especially related to burnout, that may be included in the playbook. So definitely head over to my website and make sure that you grab that the system, seercom. I have all kinds of other goodies in there, because sometimes we're not in burnout, sometimes we're in a different nervous system state than burnout, and it has all the tools there as well as actually helping you build the business systems, so that we can prevent going into these nervous system states to begin with, where our business is scaling and growing and we're getting the results we want without overworking ourselves, without expending all of our time and energy, so that we can pour our time and energy into the things that we love most. So make sure you check out the system see your playbook.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for joining me for today's episode. I am super excited to hear how this landed with you, if you've ever experienced burnout, and what helped you to come back from that state. Also, if you've ever experienced those sneaky signs and maybe you weren't even aware that that was burnout, I would love to hear about it. Share in the comments or you can always message me privately on social media or email. Cannot wait to connect with you. Have a beautiful rest of your day and I will catch you on the next episode of Effortlessly Productive.
