The ONLY way to solve creative burnout

The only way to crush creative burnout is to lean into your performance edge. Most small content creators listen to advice like publish consistently, outwork your competition grind, never stop, never stopping. And when they take it at face value, it can feel frustrating when the advice doesn't pan out or it feels forced and draining. But what if you felt excited? Excited about creating again because it was fun and engaging? So how do you find the fun and engagement and excitement when you have creative burnout? That's performance edge. So in this episode of Creators that Crush, we're going to talk about what is performance edge? How does it help you crush creative burnout? What are the three big causes of creative burnout and how to find and measure your performance Performance edge. This is the Creators that Crush podcast. I am your host and certified high performance coach, Sean Butner. And let's jump into the episode. What exactly is performance edge? And I'm going to go through a couple of different angles to explain what this is, because it's a little abstract, but it's kind of what it sounds like. It's that place where you are maximally performing at the edge of your capability, the edge of your motivation, the edge of your ability to get results. Also, you could think of it as that flow state where you're pushing yourself to grow without destroying your motivation for the work. And then as a high performance coach, we define high performance as beating the normal results in your life and work sustainably over the long term without her hurting your health and relationships. So I give you these different angles to think about performance edge just to kind of give a couple of different examples again, because sometimes it can be really tough to explain or tough to feel. But what it feels like when you're in your performance edge is that you are experiencing the joy of doing the task. You are extremely present with the work you're doing and you have confidence that you are putting your best footprint foot forward. And these are the outcomes of high performance coaching. So my question to you is, where do you get into a flow state in your current work? In your creative business or life? Where do you want to be in flow? Because sometimes as a coach, there's a lot of fighting and a lot of burnout happens when I want to be working on the creative work, but I'm caught up in all the administrative part of the business or I want to do creative work, I feel like I'm in a rut just doing the same thing over and over again. And so that causes burnout quite a bit. And we'll get into the big categories here in a second. So if you know that the places where you have flow, this flow state, or performance edge in your life, or you know where you want it to be, think about how you can be doubling down on either doing that flow state or making it happen in your creative business. And this is why finding your performance edge helps you solve your creative burnout. Because when we are challenged and progressing and we can feel the confidence, joy and presence in our work, you can't be burnt out. Okay, so how does performance edge exactly help you solve and crush creative burnout? Well, creative burnout is caused by three things. Delay, detachment, and doing it alone. And I'll deep dive into this here in a little bit. But when you find your performance edge, you're in action. You're connected to your artistic intuition and your efforts effortlessly attracting people to your work. So before we dive into defining those three areas of creative burnout that cause creative burnout, in my opinion, let's talk about what creative burnout is. It's the long standing frustration, anxiety, boredom, and ennui that comes from working hard without creating the impact that you want. So it could look like you've been doing this YouTube channel podcast writing, and you feel like you have it figured out. You're not in that learning phase. You're just kind of doing the same thing over and over again. And maybe you feel comfortable, but you don't feel like you're operating at the best of your potential and character. That could be really draining. Or you had an idea of what a creative career would look like. And it's not that right now in this moment. And it hasn't been that way for quite a while. So you start to check out of actually making the content. You, you start to look for shortcuts, you look to others to copy other people's ideas, and you kind of lose your creative spirit or your creative perspective. It can also show up as a lack of inspiration where you just are tired and exhausted. You've been putting in blood, sweat and tears, and you're not seeing the results that you want. And something needs to change and you know it and you don't know the next ways forward. This is what we're fighting against. And in my opinion as a coach and what I've seen working with creators, there are three things that really create this creative burnout. First is delay. Delay is the enemy. Because when you get into action, momentum, it's hard to you get into learning. And when you're learning, it's hard to be bored. With the things that you're working on. So there is a creator group that I Community that I joined earlier this year, and I'd been working with someone in that community, helping them start a habit of making YouTube shorts every week. I really want. They're super committed. It's super necessary for what they want to do, and they just can't seem to start the habit. And I talk about the minimum viable action a lot in previous episodes, but it's so easy to say, I'll do this in next month, I'll do this in five months. I'll do this in, you know, next year. You put the action out in the future, and then you wonder why you feel stuck or you wonder why you feel burnt out because you're not actively moving towards a goal. And so I've been encouraging this person in the community to just, if you want to do YouTube shorts, just pick up your phone every day, record a funny face that you make into your phone, don't release the video to anyone, and do that for a week and see what happens. And the human nature part of getting into action and getting into momentum is eventually, if you do that long enough, you're like, the hardest part is to get started. But now I want to take the next action. Instead of doing a funny face, maybe I'll say something insightful. Maybe I say something insightful like, oh, I like that. Then you post it. And so it's setting up the environment for you to take action consistently and the easiest possible action you can to get the result that you want to move towards that future goal for you. So we need to be battling delay if we want to battle creative burnout. The second thing is to follow your artistic intuition, because as soon as we get detached from the work we're doing or how we help our audience and people, we, you know, start going through the motions. The more burnt out we feel. And I have a really exciting episode with somebody that helped me out earlier this year on the podcast. So I'm really excited for this. It'll be out in a week or two as of recording this episode. But he tells a story to kind of just give you the cliff notes and highlight why you should follow your artistic intuition and how it beats burnout is he'd been doing this podcast work for seven years, and almost to the date, he's like, okay, I am bored. I am burnt out. I don't really want to do this anymore. And what I have been teaching hasn't really been working. So am I actually really helping people? So Huge problem, especially if that's your business. And so he decided he's going to rebrand because he's like, I think I want to try something and do something a little bit more engaging. And just something in his heart was saying, I need to follow this. And so spent the first part of this year in 2025 with the rebrand that's a little bit of a broader audience. Learned a whole bunch of new stuff going through. It kind of went through starting restarting a podcast, which is what he teaches, and learned a whole bunch and found that spark. Right. And so he decided he's going to revert the brand back to the old thing. But he's got this new perspective, so he's found a new angle. He's found new things that work, and he is reinvigorated for the old thing. So he's re. Rebranding from the old thing to the new thing, back to the old thing. And he's, like, fired up. You could really see that the quality of his content has changed because he's more engaged, he's more happy, he's more into it. And so that's why we have to follow our artistic intuition to battle creative burnout. And then the third thing is if you are, you know, taking action, if you're following your intuition, it's still not working. You might need to get in front of other people and you have to battle, you know, isolation, especially if you're a solopreneur or content creator, that you're the only person in the business. And that was me this year. I have been, you know, had a YouTube channel for 10 years. I've had a podcast for two years at the beginning of this year. Ish. And I wasn't seeing the audience growth. I wasn't seeing the audience engagement and the impact that I wanted, you know, to, one, know that when I record one of these, these are actually helpful. But two, to like, you know, find out what people are actually working on. And so I hired a podcast coach, the guy in the previous episode, which I'm purposely teasing, because literally the next week or two, this episode is going to come out, and I'm super stoked for it. I joined creative communities like the one from the the person and the delay with the YouTube shorts was talking about or I was talking about. And I've engaged in other communities, been a little bit more active in the existing communities that I have, and it's been a life changer. It's really reinvigorated my motivation to show up every week. And record a podcast to show up and work with clients, all of that stuff. So, yeah, the three things that cause creative burnout in my estimation are delay, it's detaching from the work and not following your artistic intuition and then being isolated. When you are in creative burnout, it can be extremely difficult to figure out and diagnose how you got there and how to move forward and through it. So if you've been experiencing creative burnout for quite a while and you want a deeper, more personalized dive into what's going on and how to move forward, I invite you for a free 30 minute creature stream strategy performance call where we'll focus on what's going on. There's no selling or anything. I just want to get to know you a little bit more and how I can help you. And we'll come up with something to break through your creative burnout and help you move forward. So if you're Interested, go to SeanButter.com backslash30, which is the numbers, and we'll have that in the show notes below. So with that, back to the episode. Now the question is, how do you find or improve your performance edge? And I have five metrics from high performance that will tell me if you are in creative burnout or not. And that is measuring and trying to improve or seeing how you might improve one of these five categories. Clarity, energy, courage, productivity and influence. So in clarity, what I'm looking for is how clear are you in your values and the value you provide and how you show up in the world. You know, how those values translate into your work, how clear you are for the future of your creative business, for your creative artistic side, for your lifestyle, all these types of things. And the more clear you are about this, the harder it is to be burnt out because you know exactly what the next steps to take to get the outcomes that you want to improve your results. And so barring that, you know the second measure is energy. And this is important because it's how motivated you feel. It's your ability to emotionally connect through your creations. It's the ability to handle teammate or team issues. And so if this is low, you know, maybe you're not taking care of yourself. So going back to the definition of high performance and performance edge, you are not able to sustainably get and improve results in your life because you're just exhausted. And so this could be an easy fix. There could be a lot of different factors here, but when you are exhausted, you're more likely to feel burnt out. And I could Go into a bajillion different examples of that personally and with clients. But I'm sure if you think about it, it's probably true for you if you can think of a moment where you felt burnt out. Third thing is, where are you decisive or indecisive in your creative endeavor? So how courageous are you in making decision and following through? If you have the clarity, you have the motivation and energy, and you're afraid, this is really the measure of where are your fears getting in your way? The work here is to discover, uncover those fears if they're unconscious, make them conscious, and to face them and take action in spite of them. And this comes up a lot in burnout and too much to go into this episode here. But, you know, measuring how decisive and courageous you are and following your dream, following your big idea is where this kind of hits the road. Take a look at your productivity and where you're getting distracted, where you're losing focus, or where you're focusing on things that are not the priority or the wrong things. And so we are, as humans are masters of tricking ourselves into, if I'm just moving, then I'm, you know, productive. And that's not the case. And I could share that. Having done over 700 YouTube videos and for like 600 of those videos, getting zero views and zero audience that, you know, I was doing, I was. I had the energy, I was putting myself out there. I was clear on how this could help my business. And I wasn't getting the results because I wasn't focusing on the right things. I was focusing on pushing myself into my performance edge to improve as a communicator, as someone that sets up these episodes, as an editor in all these different areas. So knowing where there's skill gaps or knowing where you're floundering and need some extra help or extra education, or you just need to, like, buckle up and, like, focus for an hour every day is really important. And then the fifth measure of your performance edge is influence. How are your people skills in getting people to believe in your ideas, to want to join your team, to support you as you're fumbling through things or moving people into action? You know, these are the social. This is the social side of your performance edge, where you're getting collaborators, and so how great are you doing on your people skills relates? So the good thing about this assessment of your performance edge is if you are able to improve one area of this, the other areas tend to improve a little bit. So if you are, like, thinking as I'm talking about this of, like, how clear am I in my creative endeavor? How much energy do I have day to day, physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually? Or how am I taking decisive, bold action every day towards my dreams? Or, you know, as I'm talking through this, you're like, ooh, maybe I need to work on my productivity, or maybe I need to work on being a little bit more confident and decisive in my choices and following through or, you know, whatever comes up to you. The great news is, is if you focused and thought, like, how could I get better at being courageous? And you thought through a couple things that will make you more performant, it'll make you more happy, you'll get more momentum, you will start to pull yourself out or prevent creative burnout. Finding and living in your performance edge is essential. And there's so many ways where we can get tripped up. And I'm just, I'm cheering you on. Like, I know that it's tough and I'm a high performance coach. I know this happens to me and I know how hard it is to dig yourself out of creative burnout if you're experiencing it. And you don't have to be stuck in creative burnout for a long period of time, right? Being able to notice where you know these five different areas of your performance edge and where you might have faltered, you might have been really clear today, and then tomorrow your clarity is blown out the window because there's a new AI tool, right? And it's doing the thing that you thought you were special in, and now you're feeling bad about yourself, you're not clear on how to handle that new situation. This is a continual thing that we're sharpening, we're honing, that we are putting out into the world. And it's tough and it's rewarding. If you can stay on that performance edge or not get distracted by the stupid AI tool stuff, then you'll find the thing that works for you. You'll find your happy place where you are confident about the things you're creating and how you're connecting with people in the world and everything changes. That's this episode of Creators that Crush. I hope you really loved this episode. If you did, you're gonna love this. 7 Signs of Creator Burnout. So if you want a different set of or different perspective on how to figure out if you're in creative burnout or not, this episode is definitely for you. So check that out in the show notes or over here on the YouTube channel and we'll see you guys in the next episode.