Burnout is a known risk for entrepreneurs and small business owners. When we experience it, the first thing we are told to do is to get some rest. And you may need a lot of rest to recover your energy if you’ve been pushing too hard for too long. 

But sometimes rest helps, and sometimes it does not. If you have been resting, eating well, exercising, and doing all the things you know you should be doing and you are still experiencing burnout, you may not be burned out at all.

I received a newsletter that really caught my attention recently with the subject line “[Sparked Insider #65] You’re Not Just Burned Out, You’re Misaligned.” I knew I needed to read this one. This newsletter is a follow-up series to the book Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work That Makes You Come Alive by Jonathan Fields, and also his fantastic Sparketype Assessment, which I recommend to everyone because it’s free and very helpful. 

From the newsletter: 

This week I want to challenge a word, a word so common now, that we reach for it reflexively whenever work stops feeling good.

Burnout.

It’s become the catch-all diagnosis for every kind of work exhaustion. And sometimes it’s exactly the right word. But I’ve come to believe that a huge number of people who say “I think I’m burned out” are actually describing something different — and the distinction matters enormously, because the two may have opposite cures.

The problem: mistaking misalignment for burnout and treating the wrong thing.

Here’s the trap. When work drains or stifles you, the standard advice kicks in, rest more, take a holiday, set boundaries, practise self-care, maybe take a sabbatical. All sensible. All aimed at refilling a depleted tank.

But what if the tank isn’t the problem? What if the problem is that you’re pouring your energy into work that runs against your core impulse all day long and no amount of rest fixes that, because the moment you return, the draining resumes?

That hit me like a ton of bricks because I have had to coach my clients and myself through this over the years. 

As a small business owner, it can be difficult not to pursue something that is (or could be) lucrative. Sometimes a coach or other advisor has to point out that this path might lead to financial success, but it also might lead to a miserable situation that is exactly what the business owner has been saying they didn’t want.

In my own business, I have had to step back several times and try to look objectively at what I was creating. For some reason, I am dead-set on having a business where I can be locationally independent. There have been so many opportunities to pursue that would have required me to be in a specific location on a regular basis, but I couldn’t make myself do it. They were out of integrity with the life I want to have.

With my clients, when they are miserable in their business and clearly experiencing misalignment, we go through all of their service offerings and determine which ones give them energy and which ones suck their soul dry. The latter get taken off their company’s website. 

It can be hard to walk away from something that has been profitable, but in this case, the emotional and physical cost is just too high. You need to stay in alignment with who you are and what you want to do with your life and business. 

Photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash