Today on the Podcast Therapist, we're tackling burnout and the importance of taking breaks, especially during the holidays. And I'll share how embracing rest can actually boost your creativity into the new year. It's all coming up next on the Podcast Therapist for December 26th of 2024.
When you're one unbalanced piece of audio from losing your shit, this is the Podcast Therapist. That is right. Welcome back to another episode of the Podcast Therapist.
I'm your host, the Shan Man radio broadcaster, podcaster, and a podcast producer. This is the program helping podcasters and podcast entrepreneurs market and grow their podcast and maybe even share a bit of inspiration to you to keep you moving in your business. And today we are going ad-free once again.
And today is the day after Christmas, Merry Christmas, happy holidays to you. I hope that you had a great holiday season so far with your family and your loved ones. I just understand how important that this time is for all of us, especially during the holidays.
I myself, spending time with family and of course, being able to spend that time with my family, especially my elderly parents who are still around. But you know, things are starting to, things are changing. You know, life is changing.
I'm getting a little bit older and we're going to talk a little bit about that today. But I certainly do hope that you enjoyed your holiday and you got everything that you wanted in terms of maybe presents and whatnot. But I don't know, maybe it's just your present was actually being with your family.
So today I want to talk with you and reflect on some post-Christmas stuff that we've got going on. All right. So this episode is not necessarily going to get into the technicalities and mechanics of podcasting because as podcasters, podcast entrepreneurs, we tend to overdo it with ourselves.
We tend to burn out, right? I mean, I am a living example of that, especially if you've been noticing my videos pop up on YouTube all of a sudden and you're like, well, he's back with, what's he doing? He's back on YouTube. Yes, I am back just because there was a point in time that I was burned out and I maybe hopefully we'll be able to share some of that with you today in that journey and hopefully maybe you can relate to that. So I definitely want to reflect on that and focus on the importance of slowing down as a podcaster and podcast entrepreneur and kind of figure out what you've got going on coming up into the new year.
So today's more of a pep talk to you than anything else. It's to help out podcasters and podcast entrepreneurs because we really race to publish episodes, right? Some of you out there, you raced to get an episode out just before Christmas or you needed to get something done and you felt as though you needed to have that episode that was out there for your dedicated listeners and I want to remind you that this isn't always something that you have to do because we don't always have to keep the algorithm happy. The algorithm is always going to be there.
The algorithm will always learn from your consistency over time and taking that break is important, all right? Taking that break is important. So I want you to really just focus on the idea that you don't have to really do this for the algorithm. There are ways that you can recover from a break, but if you're someone who's a very type A personality and you feel as though you need to publish an episode, by all means, you're more than welcome to do that, all right? So I want to talk about four main areas here, okay? I want to talk about the burnout during the holidays.
I want to really focus on the importance of taking breaks and give you some action items that you can take with you to avoid burnout and then, of course, how we can adapt to these changes, all right? So we'll start first about the burnout during the holidays, all right? So typically the holidays, right? These are the things that stress you out completely because you are either exhausted because you're trying to get up on vacation and if you're a podcast entrepreneur, there is no vacation, right? But I think that we should encourage entrepreneurs to be able to take that vacation, take that time away because even as an entrepreneur, we get to do what we want. But sometimes we fall in the trap where we end up overdoing it for ourselves. So the holidays really exacerbates and amplifies all of that for us.
We get tired, exhausted, and then we just want to be able to relax and we know that we can't relax. We have to relax, though. That's the key here, all right? So when you're juggling personal and professional duties, that can be a bit of a challenge.
Now, I will tell you this as someone who has gone through burnout himself. Those of you who have subscribed to my YouTube channel, you probably have seen this. Those of you who are listening on just as a podcast, you really didn't get to see this in the podcasting space because I just started, well, I guess you did because I did start a podcast and then I just gave up.
I just gave up on all content. And the reasons why I gave up on my content was because of burnout. When I think of burnout, though, it's interesting because I think of burnout being the hot Arizona summers here in Phoenix and one summer it was like 118 degrees for something like 27 days straight and it just felt as though the summer would never end and I felt very burned out that summer.
I think that was two summers ago and I just did not want to build out any content whatsoever. My condominium, it just could not get cold enough. I would go to other places.
I would try to get cold there and it was just a brutal summer and you just felt like a literal burnout, right? But burnout can happen outside of just like, say, heat-related burnout. It can happen because of work. And just as an added note, I will say like burnout within something in Phoenix, the heat just absolutely takes it out of you.
I understand that heat and humidity, humidity is really brutal too, but heat also just takes it out of you, especially dry heat, man, it can become very, very difficult to do any type of work and to think and you just find yourself not moving a whole lot. But I want to share with you, you know, just a little story and an anecdote behind my burnout. So the burnout happened back in 2022 and I was developing a YouTube channel.
So those of you who subscribe to my YouTube channel, you saw that I was developing content, but I had always said that if I could not come up with good content, I was not going to publish that content. And so I started missing weeks every now and again. I'd miss like not releasing an episode, right? And it became frustrating for me because I felt as though I was not giving my audience the content that they deserved.
And you know, looking back in hindsight, I feel as though that the mindset that I was in is not the mindset that I have now. I feel as though that I was not being as authentic back then as I feel as though I am now. And maybe I'm being humbled by age.
That could be a possibility. But I just know that when there was a point in time that I stopped creating content was because I was dealing with these factors. I was dealing with the factors that to develop and build out a piece of content such as video required me to not only come up with the idea, but to structure the idea to where it made more sense and to be consumable on YouTube.
In a sense, I was focusing a lot on the analytics, which analytics, you know, and the signals are very important on YouTube and not as much on Apple podcasts unless you're really looking at like where people are dropping off in certain terms of how long they listened and where they dropped off. But on YouTube, it was very specific to how long they watched the video. And I wanted to make sure that they were watching as much of the video as possible.
So I was always trying to build that in to my content and it became more difficult and harder. And this was very different from how I built content for the radio because for the radio, I just kind of riffed on it and riffing on it allowed me to organize the thoughts kind of in real time. Don't get me wrong.
I still wrote down an outline. In fact, I would handwrite outlines out a lot and I was still able to develop and create that content and deliver it live. But as far as doing YouTube was concerned, it was developing the content, recording the content, feeling as though that I had to make it perfect all of the time.
And then it required going into the next steps, which were, you know, editing the content and using something like ScreenFlow and doing this day in, day out, no team whatsoever and overwhelming myself, quite honestly. And by at one point in time, you know, we're coming out of, we're coming out of COVID and I was like, I'm, I'm amped to do all of this stuff. I'm amped to develop more content.
But then I just kind of like, have you ever hit just a wall? And that's what happened to me is I hit a wall and I was like, man, I'm exhausted. I'm so tired. Now mind you, I don't want to lay on the fact that, you know, I don't want to lean into the idea that, you know, I am someone who lives with hypothyroidism as a condition.
And so I do experience fatigue at times, but who doesn't experience fatigue, you know, whenever they're in their late forties going on 50. And so these are things, these are just factors that started to come into play. And I was having to start adjusting to this new era of my life.
And so we'll, I want to focus on these areas because these were the areas that where I fell short. And I felt, I felt, I failed, I failed myself and I failed my audience and how I recalibrated and took that failure and used it to my advantage. So that's where I want to talk to you about today.
I want to talk to you about the importance of taking breaks. I feel as though when I was developing the content back in 2020, between 2020, 2019 to 2022, I was very amped up to do that, but I feel as though I was not being authentic to myself as a result, burned myself out. So burning out during the holidays or getting ready for the holidays, it's important to take these breaks.
Just remember that. Don't feel guilty. I don't want you to feel guilty.
Which brings me into my next topic point, the importance of taking breaks. As podcasters, we have a sense of guilt for taking breaks. And I think any business owner has a guilt for taking breaks.
Maybe a team member leaves. Maybe there's a piece of content that you have to get out for yourself and you have to get out for your client and you need to get that out for the holidays. It's important to plan these things out and it's important to build in boundaries, not only for yourself, but for your clients, letting them know, I can't get things done, you know, for the week of Christmas.
I'm not going to be working because I will be out of town. Maybe my team member can handle that or it can wait until after the new year. And I think that has to be a mutual understanding between you, your clients, and of course, between yourself, if you're developing and building out content, you're building content for yourself, a podcast, because we're focusing mainly on building podcasts and building more efficient podcasts, right? And I think that's something that becomes more difficult as we start thinking and really building in our minds about the types of podcast content that we want to create.
So don't feel guilty for taking breaks and fear that you're going to be losing some type of momentum because of the algorithm or maybe the interest is going to drop off for an audience. You know, you might fall out of favor with the algorithm. These are things that all kind of go through a content creator's mind, a podcaster's mind.
And you have to remember that people ebb and flow throughout life, right? I know that there's been podcasts that I've listened to and I'll listen to them and I'll listen to them and I'll listen to them. And then I just kind of fall out of them, right? Because life happened, because, you know, I just, I had something else going on. Different events happened in my life and I wasn't able to create that consistent schedule.
Whereas maybe some people do create that consistent schedule. For me, it was the Marketplace podcast, listening to that, like a daily news podcast. And I enjoyed that.
And there just weren't times when I was able to listen to that. So I don't think anyone at 8 p.m. is like going, oh my God, Shannon didn't listen to my podcast. They understand that there are ebbs and flows in which listeners will listen.
And I've only learned this because of the years of being in radio where people tune in and they tune out. They could be in their car, going to Walmart, they listen for 15 minutes, they turn the car off, they got to go into Walmart, do their business, and then they may come back out and tune into you. Or maybe I'm in commercial break and they're tuning to a new radio station.
It's kind of similar with podcasting. We got to think about that. So I want you to reframe your guilt and reframe it into being, into growing.
So reframe your guilt into growth. I want you to see breaks as opportunities to recalibrate, to recharge, to return back stronger, and not look at them as failures. This is a misconception, a misnomer, and I think it just comes with age.
That I used to feel as though if I was not developing a piece of content, I was failing. And I said at the top of the program, I did feel as though I failed. But I don't look at it that way now anymore.
I look at my failure as growth and knowing what my limits are. Knowing how far I can take it. To put this in perspective as a, in a real life perspective.
So I have terrible ankles. Terrible ankles because many years ago, when I was in college, I was playing basketball and I rolled my ankle and sprained my ankle. I sprained one of them.
And it took forever. It took many years for that ankle to kind of get back to normal. And once it got back to normal, I was able to take on other activities.
So as I got older, I started going to the gym. I started doing more hiking. And as I started doing more hiking, I found myself rolling the same ankle.
So I rolled the same ankle again at one point in time. It healed up, didn't let it heal up enough. Got back on the mountain, I rolled the other ankle.
Because I was compensating too much on one leg for the other. So I injured the other ankle. So now I have two bum ankles.
And that just kept going on and on. As a result, spraining my ankle on each ankle four times. I did not take the rest and I did not take the breaks to let that ankle heal well enough to where I can feel confident to get up on the mountain and hike again.
And I think that is the same way we have to look at podcasting. We can feel as though we didn't do something right. We can feel as though we failed somewhere.
Or maybe we just didn't put in the reps. That is something that you have to think about. You have to remember that you cannot feel guilty for being injured or being unable to do something without the proper rest and the proper rehab.
And in the case of rehab for podcasters building a better podcast, maybe that's being able to do the rehab of learning a brand new skill. Maybe that new skill requires you to actually invest in software that will help your podcast grow, whether that be email marketing, whether that be video marketing, whether that be hiring a social media manager. You have to remember that sometimes these failures or these setbacks, let's not even call them failures, they're just setbacks.
Sometimes these setbacks are just the right thing for you to go ahead and recalibrate so you can come back a little more wise and a little bit more strong. So I want to remind you that your authenticity, I want you to value that more than anything else. I want you to value your quality over your quantity.
You can publish every single week and it can be the same type of podcast every week, but will your audience take to that or will they get bored with it? Some will just take to it, some may get bored with it. But I think if you're honest and you're authentic with yourself about taking a break, letting your audience know that it's time to take a break, they'll understand that you need a rest. You know why? Because they're human too.
Every one of us has a breaking point. Every one of us has a limit. We have to remember that we cannot be superhuman, especially if we don't have the resources to invest in other services or maybe hiring a VA.
Still, hiring a VA is going to require you to build content and you have to pump that content and send it off to your VA. But you have to remember to also take a break, take a rest, and it's okay to inform your listeners, hey, I'm going to take a month break. It's going to be completely fine.
I bring this up because I heard a podcast today where the podcaster said that they were going to be taking a break because they were just absolutely burnt out. They felt that their lives were, their life was kind of all over the place and I don't know exactly how this person would define all over the place, but to me it sounded as though that she had been spreading herself too thin. And that's completely okay.
We sometimes do that. So I think it's important that you just remain authentic, let people know, hey, I'm going to be taking a break. I'll take a break for a month.
I'll be back. Or if you just want to give it up altogether, you can say, I'm just not going to be creating content anymore. A great example of this is if you've ever been on the internet and you have, well, if you've ever been on the internet, that's crazy.
If you've ever seen the overly obsessed girlfriend meme, her name is Lena. She would do these videos on YouTube, but the one that got her the most attention was that she looked like this crazy, weird person and she looked overly obsessed and she tells a great story behind how that meme all happened and it was like, no, this is just not me being like an overly obsessed girlfriend. It was just someone took the screen cap and made it that.
And at some point in time, she was creating, well, after that, she started creating great content. She became kind of an influencer, but it became too much for her. And at one point in time, she decided to go ahead and stop developing YouTube videos because it was overwhelming her.
And she let her audience know, this is the last time that I'm going to do that. So if you're not going to create any more content, at least let your audience know, let them know, or just let them know, I'm going to be taking a really long break, but I would love it if you continue to follow or stay subscribed to my YouTube channel, stay, stay, continue following my Apple podcast feed. It will resurface.
I just, I really need a break. So don't feel guilty for being yourself. Be authentic to yourself.
I want you to always be that way for yourself because that is the one way that you will find success. As another example, me being in radio, you have to go in every single day and you have to build different content every day, even if it's in a shorter, there's shorter bits of information that you're giving on the internet or on the internet over the radio waves. You can still face burnout.
I can't tell you how many times I have gone into the radio station. I have done my shift and I have just phoned it in night after night after night after night. And that's not the best way to do it, but I've had to do it because it helped me recalibrate.
It helped me feel as though I was preserving what was left of the energy that I had. It helped me be, remain authentic. And my audience understood that.
So recalibrating during the holidays, it can help you become stronger. It's like recovery. It's like recovery in terms of exercise.
You don't have to work out every single day. You just have to work out consistently and build in time for breaks because with those breaks, those breaks allow your muscles to grow, to build, to build a habit within themselves. So more focused content will come out in the long run if you build in breaks.
So the next section is I want to leave you with some actionable steps that you can take to avoid burnout for yourself. Okay. We'll talk about five of them here.
Okay. So some of them that are pretty obvious and I'll just kind of gloss over them. You know what they are.
So some things that you can do to avoid burnout at any point in time doesn't, doesn't have to be over the Christmas holiday. It doesn't have to be over the new year's Thanksgiving. You have birthdays, there's weddings, there's graduations.
There's all these different things that we can do to avoid burnout. It will require some work, but it will avoid the burnout for you. All right.
Number one, obviously you've heard of this before batching content, creating multiple episodes over the course of certain weeks so that you can keep things moving along. You can build those ahead of time. Does take work up front might lead to a little bit of a burnout for you, but it will help you rest in the long run.
So that's number one. Number two, you definitely have to plan your breaks. And when I say plan your breaks, you have to intentionally plan your breaks.
You have to schedule time off in advance and you have to communicate that with your audience and set the clear expectation by saying, Hey, I'm going to be back in a couple of weeks, or I'm going to be back in a month because I'm going to be traveling to the UK and then I'm coming back to the States. Then I have a wedding that I have to attend. And then after that, I need to fulfill another obligation and life happens.
We're human, right? These things happen. These things happen. I have to travel.
You have to build in travel time. An example for me was, it was a couple of years ago and my dad had his 80th birthday party and we were planning this birthday party to be huge, big, all this stuff and invite all these family members. The two days after his birthday, I was going to be flying over into Austin, Texas to attend a conference and I was going to be there for three days.
Then I was going to have to fly back to Phoenix and drive directly down to Yuma, Arizona for a retirement party of my best friend from high school and then come back and start building out content for myself. Well, as life would have it, I would end up getting COVID, the day of my dad's birthday, getting sick. So I don't think I left that following Monday because I remember I was sick for a full week.
So it was the following week I had to go to Austin. So I was sick for the full week and then I went to Austin. Then I went to the retirement party and then I came home and I just could not be happier to rest.
And we have to remember that life does happen. So plan your breaks out. Sometimes they're unavoidable, but if you can plan those breaks out, it works for you in the long run.
Number three, I want you to try to figure out how you can simplify your workflows, whether that be computer workflows or even in a podcaster's case, something that I will really try to drive home in this podcast. You really need to simplify your workflows in terms of audio. I would say not just editing, but if you're going to be doing it like I'm doing where it's pre-produced, you've got hotkeys, simplify the workflows so that you can spend less time on the cutting room floor editing your podcast.
But in the other areas of your life, you might be trying to automate other things. Maybe you need to schedule in or maybe you need to develop something where there's an automated scheduling app. Maybe you need to streamline your editing software a little bit better.
Maybe you're just using free software and you need to get into something better. For me, it was Adobe Audition. What is it that you can do to outsource repetitive tasks? Hire a VA, have them post your blog, think about these things and build that into your thought process when you're taking downtime.
Number four, reflect and reassess. One of the things that I love to do as a content creator is I do like to take that time away to reflect and reassess. I like to do this on walks.
Walks are really huge for me to develop ideas. If I do yoga, because if I'm doing like a guided yoga, I don't get to think about content ideas. Walking does it for me.
And I think walking or even lifting weights for some people, it does that for them. But I just know that I can reflect and reassess and use that downtime to think about what goals I have for myself and what processes that I can implement that can make my podcast sound a little bit better. So you got to ask yourself some of these questions.
Are the systems working for you? Or what can you do to cut back or simplify your systems for the new year? Give that some thought to yourself. And then the last one I want to talk about is you have to prioritize yourself. You have to take care of yourself.
My dad was a big one on this, always saying, take care of yourself. My mom was even bigger on it. She would say, you have to take care of yourself.
You are number one. And then, of course, as I got older, I started to say, yes, I am number one. I live in this body only one time for this life.
I should take care of it. I need to take care of it. So I want you to focus on at some point between now and let's say within the next six months, I want you to focus on your physical health and your mental health.
The physical feeds into the mental. If you want to build better content, in my opinion, you need to build in some type of physical routine. And I'm not talking about lifting weights.
I'm not talking about marathon running. If it's just a walk, a walk for 30 minutes so you can develop some ideas, that would help out. I want you to also remember to rest.
If you have a hobby, like I love to play the guitar. Playing the guitar helps me just relax and unwind. It fills me with joy when I play the guitar.
Or maybe you just get to hang out with friends and not have to talk about work. These are things that you should be doing anyway. But it'll help renew your energy to get back and to do the podcasting and to not feel as though you have to feel guilty for not publishing an episode.
Okay? So last point here is that I want to acknowledge that as we all become a little older, we naturally shift into different areas of our life. We get older. We have circumstance changes.
And I want you to understand that these circumstances and paired with age, they will always change. And the one thing that is constant is change itself. So you have to remember and remind yourself of that daily, that change is always going to be happening and you have to be willing to adapt to it.
All right? So you need to set realistic goals. I know there's our podcasters out there that like to set these huge, massive goals. Like I want to impact 1 billion followers around the world and I'm going to make a difference in the world.
To me, that goal is a little too cumbersome. It's a little, it's way too much. I would rather be able to celebrate small wins by creating goals that are probably a little more realistic than anything else.
So focus on creating long -term goals that are realistic for long-term success. And don't worry about the short-term perfection. When I started in radio, I didn't know exactly what I was doing.
It took me about six years to figure out how to do my job appropriately. So you're going to screw up. So you might as well have fun while you're doing it.
So just make sure that you don't have to have it perfect in the short-term, but you do need to focus on what the long -term will look like. And with that experience over the long-term, you can build a story for yourself. And that story can build in experiences and those experiences can help other people.
So I want to encourage you to lean into these changes, be optimistic, and I want you to use these opportunities, not just opportunities. I want you to look at them as failures. I want you to look at them as growth opportunities, a chance for you to reinvent yourself.
And I think that will make you a more successful podcaster going into the new year, maybe the next two years, maybe the next five years. Don't be too hard on yourself. So as it comes down to the end of the year, maybe you publish some episodes, maybe you really work towards getting them published.
That's fine. Or maybe you feel guilty for not publishing. That's fine, too.
You're only human, but I want you to remain authentic to yourself. Now, before we get out of here, I want to go ahead and remind you that if you're looking to start a podcast, that I have an essential equipment guide that you can go ahead and check out on my website. It has a list of all the equipment that is available for you to go ahead and check out for yourself.
So whether you want to get the hardware, you want to get the software, it is all listed in that equipment guide that is for free on my website. If you want to go ahead and grab it, the link is in the show notes of this particular podcast. Or if you're on YouTube watching this right now, it is in the description below.
You can go ahead and check it out. Or if you are watching this on YouTube, I'll make a little card that comes up somewhere over here where you can go ahead and click on that, and it'll take you over to my website to grab that essential equipment guide. All right.
So in closing, I want to leave you with a quote. It's from one of my favorite motivational speakers. He's no longer with us.
He passed away quite a few years ago. But I listened to his book, The Power of Ambition. Sorry about that.
I was going to look on my bookshelf over here and looking at it. But The Power of Ambition, I used to listen to it all the time on hikes before I injured myself a lot, but I still take a lot of his lessons to heart. His name was Jim Rohn, the late great Jim Rohn.
And this is the quote I want to share with you. He says, happiness is not something you postpone for the future. It's something you design for the present.
So I want you to think about this. I want you to reflect on how you can create happiness and balance in your life right now. I want you to take and reflect on how you can value these breaks by taking breaks and setting goals and appreciating the small wins, how those will help you in the long term.
It's just so valuable when you look at that again. Happiness is not something you postpone for the future. It's something that you design for the present.
Oh, sorry about that. I was hitting a music bed, wrong music bed, but I think we'll go with this music bed right here. There we go.
I think my Rodecaster Pro disconnected my iPad. That's going to do it for the Podcast Therapist for December 26th. I want to encourage you to go ahead and like this podcast on YouTube.
Make sure you share it with friends. Make sure you hit that subscribe button. And if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app or Spotify, make sure you follow this podcast.
Help this podcast get out on the feed for not just Apple Podcasts, Spotify, but also on YouTube. Likely you guys have been seeing me show up in feeds on YouTube and on Apple Podcasts. And that is really helpful because these podcasts are meant to help all podcasters and all podcast entrepreneurs.
So I want to leave you with a very, very well wish. I hope you had a great Christmas holiday. I want to make sure that you take this advice, you think on it, you marinate on it.
And you're able to develop something that is incredible for the rest of the world in 2025 and beyond. Thank you so much for listening to the Podcast Therapist this week. We'll see you next time.
