Rico Sharp, a life coach and founder of multiple educational initiatives, breaks down how burnout creeps up on helping professionals. He outlines three steps to recover: rest by taking real vacations, reset by re-energizing, and realign by reconnecting with your original purpose.
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And then you begin to focus on what you know and of course how you connect with people. Point number 2, break the cycle of burnout. I'm also a life coach, I'm a counselor, I'm a mentor, and I get a chance to talk with a lot of people. I mentor professional athletes in the NBA, NFL, and one WBO boxer. And one of the things that I'm beginning to realize with traveling the world, talking to people, is that there are a lot of people who are dealing with emotional burnout, physical burnout, mental burnout, psychological burnout, interpersonal burnout, professional burnout. How do we break the cycle of burnout? Well, first we got to start resting. I take about five vacations every year. I run multiple businesses. I have a lot going on in my life. I'm the founder of Student Lives Matter, a program foundation that I designed to help students to be academically achievable, to be educationally. Accomplishment. I'm also the founder of Teacher Lives Matter, where I do training for teachers, for educators. I also have an academy called the Best You Leadership Academy online, another academy called the Best English Speakers Academy. I wrote a curriculum for schools called Breaking the Silence: Stopping Gun Violence. I'm on a mission to put an end to school shootings here in the United States. Yeah, you can clap right there because that's a big one, right? I also run real estate investment. I'm also speaking around the world. And you ask, how am I able to do all these things? I get asked all the time. There's a couple of things that I didn't mention that I do. Well, I take vacations. I know how to step away. I know how to put the closed sign up on the front door. I know how to keep from getting burnt out. I didn't always know, but I've learned. And so burnout doesn't happen overnight, it happens over time. One of the things that we're dealing with right now In the area of mental health services, with mental health workers, mental health wellness suppliers, people are getting burned out. People are quitting. People are walking away. People are walking away from careers that have— they've invested in for the last 15, 20 years of their life. Why is that? Why are people leaving instead of coming in? Because people are getting burnt out. It drains your energy, your motivation, and your joy when you're burnt out. People are ignoring the signs today that leads to breakdown tomorrow. I believe that you can't pour from an empty cup. You got to stay refreshed, revitalized. You got to make sure that you are not allowing For the years and the hours and the times and the mental anguish and all that you give, you got to make sure that you're not allowing for that to take all that you have out of you. Like it's not draining and depleting you, right? You have to rest. You have to reset. You have to realign. What you do is so important. Who you are is so important. You cannot allow yourself to be lost in the transition. of saving others. You have to remember your why when you question yourself about whether or not you feel like you can do this any longer. You have to go all the way back to the beginning. Why did you sign up in the first place? What was it that connected with your heart that prompted you to come to this particular industry and build the career off of helping people? What was your why? And you have to revisit back to that why and remind yourself of what your cause and your purpose is in life. You can't serve from exhaustion. You have to take care of you. Your well-being matters, so protect your purpose
