BURNOUT Can Sneak Up & Ruin You - 7 Tips to Fight It

Burnout can dang near kill you. It is real. It is prevalent in the roofing space. It ruins marriages, causes divorce, has people turn to alcohol, drugs or other unhealthy behaviors to disconnect. And if you're not careful, it will sneak up slowly until one day you reach a breaking point that you cannot ignore. And at that point it is too late. And your two choices are to quit or bear down and find a way through it. And it's often in the hardest time of your life. Like the two times that I experienced burnout. But before I share those stories, this video is for you. If you are someone who is nearing burnout right now, this video is for you. If you're someone like me who jumps out of bed, wildly passionate, racing through the day. It's nine o' clock at night and you just wish there was more time. But that feeling is melting away and being replaced by pure dread and drudgery. This video is for you. Owners and managers and leaders. When you're witnessing this in your team and you know that they've been busting their butt and they just need some, some kind of a way in, a path to tap back into that passion that they had that you're watching just kind of fall apart. So if you're in any of those camps, watch this video and please share it because it can help all of us survive burnout and enjoy our life in roofing sales so we can smash our income goal, give every customer an amazing experience. Welcome or welcome back. Adam Bensman here and thanks for joining me today. The reason that I do what I do is because in my estimation, 66% or so of first year roofing sales reps quit or get fired. And burnout is an often cause of that. And some people burn out really early. And for those that do survive, many of them burnout later and again ends up in divorce, alcoholism destroyed, relationships that aren't ending in divorce, poor health problems, and more so in this video, I want to share with you two really quick stories of how I burned out in the most recent one was within about a month ago, but the big life adjustments that I've made and you can say, hey, great, I'm watching a video from a hypocrite who burned out twice and is going to teach me how not to burn out. Well, the point is I'm not a saint, but I do believe that I'm on the path upwards and I know that from the feedback from the people around me because this video was actually inspired inadvertently from John Comerford on our team. And John said to me, adam, you, you've got like a Zen about you lately. You're calm, you're focused, you're present, you're here. It's like a new version of you. And it's largely in part to these seven different tips I'm going to share with you that will help you avoid burnout. So let's get started now. First, quick story. I, in my past life, when I was in roofing sales, I became hyper focused on financial gain and growth and I got really messed up in my head where I tied my net worth to my, to my personal worth. And I remember being on a treadmill before I, by the way, before I stopped using the treadmill because a 12 ounce curl was a much easier way to relax. Being on that treadmill, running, visualizing my next financial goal, hitting it. I mean, if that's not screwed up, I don't know what is. Quickly thereafter, I ended up saying, hey, that's too hard to work out. Let's just jump to the old 12 ounce curl, that's easier. I ended up gaining 30 pounds. My health slid, my personal relationship slid, I chased money, and I ended up in the ICU thinking I was having a heart attack before I was even 30 years old with a chest infection. And that chest infection is, when I say chest, that's the sac surrounding your heart. And they said it's heavily linked to stress. And the outcome was, you'll be fine, it'll hurt, whatever, it'll go away. Or option two, they need to go in and actually relieve the pressure and the fluid buildup from that infection. And again, heavily linked to stress. So the nurse comes over, she goes, are you under any stress? Like, honey, sit down, grab a notepad, let's chat. So the answer is, stress is not good for you. Next time I burned out, which was not too long ago, about a month ago. And it was coming off the tail end of the highest stress time of my life. Speaking at 50 different events in 26 weeks. So it's six months. I spoke at 50 events, bouncing off and from literally coast to coast. Like, I went from Philadelphia to la, all over the place, two to three events in a week. I did have Christmas and New Year's off, but high stress, high pressure to perform, lowest sleep, especially with time zone changes, poorest diet and no time for fitness and really no personal life because I was only home a few days a week and I was trying to get caught up with my business and my personal life and then back on the road Again. So during that time, which then later led to high, extremely high levels of anxiety, anxiety attacks, which I had never had as an adult before. I had them as a child, but not as an adult. And it was just a horrible, horrible thing. And it was a wake up call. So I'm not sitting here preaching as a saint like I've got everything figured out, Zen meditation guru. But what I am sharing is practical advice. It's helped me and I hope it can help you. And I do hope that you can contribute by dropping a comment in the comment section below, sharing your tips to avoid burnout. So let's jump right into tip number one, shall we? Tip number one is probably the most important change you can make. And it's this little thing, your phone. Get it out of your bedroom. What we often do is we have it set on our end table and it's our alarm and it buzzes. And then we wake up and we turn the alarm off and then we see our phone calls, missed calls, voicemails, we have our text messages, we have our team chat and then we have our emails and then we're into it. And then we're in reactive mode. Absolutely. Instantly, the first second of the day, we literally wake up to work. We wake up in reaction mode. I got to do this. I got to do this. And then we're frantic and we're anxious. So what Sheena and I say is there's no contraband, meaning your phone allowed in our bedroom. We keep our phones plugged in in the laundry room, which is a separate room. We have alarm clocks in the room. That's it. Now I get up. I don't have this stuff fully fleshed out on today's agenda, but with my morning routine, I don't even go in my laundry room to get my phone until I'm done and ready to actually start my day. So tip number one, get your phone out of your bedroom. Buy a digital alarm clock. You can get them on Amazon for stupid stuff. Stupid, cheap. Alright. Tip number two is boundaries. If you're anything like me, I used to respond to calls all the time. Day, night, weekend, text messages coming in, emails all the time. And someone once said to me, adam, you teach people or train people how to communicate with you. If you respond on a Sunday at 6.30pm, they expect a response at 7 when they email back. So instead what you can do is simply set boundaries. You can do that in your email signature. I check email Monday through Friday, 9:00am to 5:00pm that's it. I'll get Back to you during then. Alright then, in your voicemail. What about this example? Hey, thanks for calling Adam, the roof strategist. Thank you so much for calling. I check my voicemails Monday through Friday between 8am and 6pm if this is an emergency, please shoot me a text. We'll get you taken care of right away. Thank you so much again for calling. I can't wait to serve you. Alright, just something like that where it says here's the time frame in which I'm available to serve you. And that way for the people that push back at me and they say, Adam, what about an emergency? They'll call twice. If you say it's an emergency, text me. You're going to look at it and see. Okay? Crap, there's a leak. I got to go run this thing right or the crew just fell through the roof, something crazy happened, I got to jump on it. Alright, so that's number two is boundaries. Tip number three is sleep. I started to drink the Kool Aid that like sleep was for the week and that you know, know the real people get up and start their day at three in the morning. And I became, I was inching my time up. I became about a 5:35, 5am to 5:30pm Natural wake up time. I started to inch it sometimes about 4:45 or so. But I kept finding that I go to sleep a little bit later and then I started finding that I was just really draggy all the time. My brain wasn't like working properly. I just saw David Goggins speak at the Owens Corning Platinum conference and he said that he was know, surviving on minimal like two hours of sleep a night for many years. His adrenals went haywire. It's called adrenal fatigue and it turns out it's a real thing. And that was happening to me. And he says now it's eight or nine hours of sleep, non negotiable. So now I have a bedtime. I'm in bed between 8:30 and 9, lights out at 9, my alarm goes off at 6 and I used to be ashamed to say, oh, I sleep, I sleep until six o'. Clock. Well guess what? I sleep until six. I do a meditation while I'm laying in bed instead of zipping myself up, I calm myself down and that leads me to tip number four. So tip number four, after I wake up for my eight to nine hours of sleep and I do my meditation instead of again waking up, grabbing my phone, being zipped up into phone mode and then drinking coffee and getting Zipped up, I zen out, do my meditation to calm down. And then David Goggins inspired this one as well. He says, I do something that sucks every single day and for me that's running. And I began to run every single single morning, get my workout in. Doesn't matter how cold it is, doesn't matter how crummy it is, I'm out there. I had a flight the other day, I had to leave for like 7:00am I got up, I went to bed extra early, got up about 5 or 5:30, I can't recall. I threw a headlamp on. I live in the middle of nowhere in the mountains. It's pitch black and 20 degrees out. And I went for my three mile run because that was part of my self care. So exercising first thing because otherwise if we exercise after work for many people, I know some folks are good with this. But for me, after work, I'm tired, I'm hungry, I'm ready to eat dinner. And then instead of getting my workout in, I'm like, well, I got to go eat. But then that takes time and then it's too late to work out or I eat and then I'm too full and I don't want to work out because I feel like I'll barf. So I just get it in and I don't have to worry about it later. Alright, there's tip number four. Exercise first thing in the morning, whatever that means to you. If you're not a runner, who cares? Go lift weights, sit on a rower, go for a walk. I, I started doing this by the way, by simply going for a walk, ease into it and then it turned into running. Alright, tip number five. This is more of a recent one for me as well and it's reading something non work related to Disconnect from the day I got lost in these fantasy books. And I love it. I get lost in this new world. I felt weird, like a bizarre teenager, like a dork. And then now I finished this one. It was like 750 pages or something. I was like, I'll try something new. But there's a second one in the series. Let me try the sample. Well now I'm halfway through that second book and there's a third one. But I love that I get sucked into this story. I'm not watching tv, I'm lost in a new world. I disconnect and then I just, I fall asleep. And I love it. It's amazing and I wish I had done that earlier. So there's tip number five. Reading something to disconnect each and every night. Alright, that's not business related because I used to do that at night and then my mind's spinning all night long with ideas. Tip number six, planning an organization. Every single day doesn't end like today, will not end until tomorrow is planned. So tonight, by the time I'm done with work and I'm filming this now at just 5:40pm my day will not be done until I finish this. I look at what I'm doing tomorrow, when my meetings are and what tasks I need to get done and I'm organizing my day. What gets done when and now I know exactly what I'm doing tomorrow and and in fact I already have most of my week preplanned from last week as I'm going through everything now. What does that mean to you? Plan your day the night before every day, you plan the next day. That also means batching your time in your mornings. You want to do your non income producing activities. Meaning you can't be selling. It's 7 to 10am in the morning. What we want to be doing is our administrative work, maybe our follow up emails, some follow up calls with folks on their way to work. So I guess that is income producing. You could be doing your supplements, your paperwork, updating your CRM. All those activities that kind of bog you down, get them out of the way at the right time so when you do get busy, all that stuff can get filled up with the real income producing activity. Your sales appointments, generating leads, knocking doors, meeting with insurance adjusters. Again, storm retail, doesn't matter. But planning your day in organization and on that light. One of the pro tips that I have is when you are working in roofing, in roofing sales, what we end up doing for many of us is time just fills and then we try to like sprinkle in our personal life around work but then we get busier and busier and busier so that those sprinkle times dwindle. And then a year, two years, five years, ten years goes by. You're like I haven't taken a vacation. Which happens to me by the way. It was like up until this year, I think it was like three years before I had a vacation. And instead Sheen and I sit down and we have planned out our entire year vacations. We just got back from a four wheeling trip to Moab. It was amazing. Okay, we're going to on a vacation to Cabo. We're going to go see my family for a family reunion. We saw her family which was Preplanned for a lake house week. And we rented a lake house. All of these things are preplanned. So that way when work gets busy, we just work around it. So if you're someone that feels like work just kind of overwhelms you, pre plan your stuff and you'll just work your stuff around it. I know it'll be scary. It was scary as heck to me. But I promise it'll work. Which leads me to tip number seven and my absolute favorite one. This comes up a lot in the studies of anxiety and health and wellness, which is having fun. Go do something that is fun. You need to fuel yourself. People would tell me this, I'm like, that's boring. Just work, get it done. Let's go. And now I found just such rich refueling of living life. And speaking of fun, that's why we went to Moab. I mean I just got back last night. Sheen and I, we hooked up our four wheeler. Her mom and her stepdad came out and and we went out and just were in the desert and it was gorgeous views. We had some super fun four wheeling. One really sketchy spot where everyone got out because if I was an inch over, I'd roll hundreds of feet down a mountain. Really not a fun time. Makes me sweat thinking about it. But we had a blast and we built that time in. So do what fuels you. Have fun. Do the hunting trip, the fishing trip, the outing, the bucket list trip. I'm making up for lost time, my friends. I just went to see the northern lights in Alaska not long ago. This winter is in March and again built that in right after. My breaking point, by the way, is what prompted that one. It was just gorgeous. So have some fun. So in summary, quick the seven tips to avoid burnout Phone. Get it out of your bedroom. Get an alarm clock. Number two, set boundaries on your phone in communications for your voicemail and your email. Number three, sleep. Don't shortchange yourself. Eight to nine hours a night. Number four, exercise first thing in the morning. Number five, when you go to bed at night, read something that allows you to get lost in a world and disconnect. And don't read business books at night. Number six, plan and organize your days. Plan the night before. Structure in all your vacations so everything can build around it. And then number seven, have some fun. Go do it. That's all for this video. Thanks so much for joining me. Just because our time here is about to wrap up doesn't mean your in my time has to. So if you haven't yet done it. I invite you to join me inside our free training center right here. Or text the word free to 3032271 33. That's 303-22-27133. Or if you want to hang with me here on YouTube. YouTube thinks you're really going to love this video, and I will see you in the next one.