Burned Out and Ready to Quit!

 What happens when you just don’t want to do it anymore? What happens when you’ve lost your mojo? What do you do when the love is gone? No, I’m not talking about your personal relationships, I’m talking about your work and business and, ultimately, what we’re going to talk about on this episode is something that affects everyone at some point and in some area of life. What we’re talking about is the very real psychological and emotional condition of burnout.

Have you ever been burned out on something? What did it feel like? What were the symptoms? What caused it? And what did you do to move past the burnout and find your mojo again?

Before we get into the main topic of this episode, if you are getting burned out with dealing with the lending side of your appraisal business and wished you had focused a little more on building up the non-lender segment of your business, I want to give you something of a blueprint for building up your non-lender appraisal business in 2024. It’s completely free and you can find it at www.coachblaine.com/diversify . It’s an hour and 20-minute-long video training on some of the things I did to build up a multi-six figure per year appraisal business doing only non-lender appraisals. I give you all of the resources we use and hold nothing back.

Let’s talk about something very real that almost every human being on the planet experiences at some point in their life, if not multiple times throughout life. It manifests in a variety of ways depending on your personality, your workload, your vision for your life, and several other factors. 

Burnout is very real, and I know it’s real because, not only have I gone through it several times myself, I’m in a phase of burnout at this very moment, which is what prompted me to talk about it on the show. When I say I’m in a ‘phase’ of burnout, I’m using that language specifically because I know something very important: how we talk and what we label things has a massive effect on how we experience them.

If you’ve ever witnessed a toddler walking with a parent or playing at the playground fall down and skin their knee, how the parent reacts plays a major role, not only in how the child experiences the skinned knee, but also in how they handle falls later in life. If the parent doesn’t react much at all, the child realizes fairly quickly that it’s not that big of a deal and they’re going to be ok. If the parent reacts with a big gasp, sprinting to the child to pick them up and coddle them, the child learns that falling down and skinning your knee is a big deal, and it’s also something that gets attention from mom or dad. 

I’m making a big generalization with that anecdote, of course, but it’s meant to make the point that what we learn to label things tends to be how we experience them. If mom or dad gasps in horror at the fall and the scraped knee, the experience forever gets a label and will be how we react to other falls and scraped knees in life. If mom or dad have very little reaction and simply say, ‘you’re ok, let’s brush it off and see how it looks... Aww, that’s not bad at all, you’re going to be just fine’, that experience too gets a label, and the child will have just been given a new tool with which to label future similar experiences.

It's for this reason that I say I am in a phase of burnout. If I tell myself I’m in a phase of an experience, I’m telling myself I’m moving through it. I’m also telling my brain to be on the lookout for solutions and opportunities to move through the phases.

If you too are experiencing some kind of burnout feelings, be sure to change the way you talk about it with yourself and others so that you’re not using absolute language like saying, ‘I’m burned out!’. It may very well be true, but every time you say it, you’re reinforcing in your brain that you’re burned out and then you tend to feel hopeless about the situation. Instead, start to tell yourself that you’re simply experiencing some aspects of burnout, but that you’re moving through it. It’s definitely ok to acknowledge that you’re burned out, but the words you use also matter, and they have a big effect on how you move through it and how long you deal with the symptoms.

What causes burn out? Well, therapists and psychologists have identified 6 main causes of burnout, at least as it pertains to our work. Of course, you can deal with emotional burnout from relationship struggles. You can suffer from industry or profession burnout after so many years or so many struggles in a certain industry. Whatever the type of burnout, the point is that it’s real and there are causes. Like most things, when we know the cause of something, we can learn from it and learn ways to avoid it in the future.

What I’m going to do in this episode is take all 6 causes of burnout and condense or combine them into 3. I don’t really think it’s helpful for this discussion to drag out all of the nuance between the 6 different causes since several of them are similar to each other. So, with that, let’s talk about what causes burnout and how to avoid it. 

The first cause of burnout is one that will be familiar to most of you because its workload related. This one basically comes down to a perception of balance. When the workload matches your capacity, all is good. When workload and your capacity are out of balance, things start to break down.

By the way, this doesn’t always mean that burnout only happens when your workload is greater than your capacity. It can also happen when your capacity far outweighs your workload and then stress and anxiety creep in. We’ve seen a lot of this in the last couple years in the appraisal, real estate, and mortgage professions as interest rates have increased and business has slowed down for many. While you might be tempted to say, ‘I’d love to be burned out with too much business at this point’, be careful what you wish for because burnout is a symptom of several things being present at once, one of the big ones being stress. When you’re stressed out about paying the bills and where your next deal is coming from, burnout is right around the corner. 

Nevertheless, the most common role that workload plays when it comes to burnout is when you simply have more work than you can physically, mentally, and emotionally handle. This is where coaching has helped for so many since one of the big things we work on with coaching students is identifying capacity and then figuring out how to be more efficient with time, movement, and your workflow. Free up capacity by becoming more efficient, not only are you avoiding burnout, you’re typically making a lot more money in less time as well.

If you‘ve ever seen the inside of an old galvanized steel water pipe, what you saw was a greatly reduced water flow due to years of built up crud. What used to have a nice powerful flow of water is now extremely inefficient at delivering the water through it. It’s the primary reason most water pipes today are copper or some form of plastic. Copper and plastic resist becoming inefficient by refusing to take on all the built-up crud along the inner walls over time.

Much like you and your business, you start to gather crud along the inner walls of your thinking and your business processes. The build-up is what slows you down, limits your capacity, make you frustrated, and eventually leads to burnout. 

Of course, what kind of coach would I be if I just talked about the symptoms or the problem without also talking about some of the solutions to those problems? One of the best burnout prevention measures as it relates to this workload and inefficiency conundrum is twofold: you’ve got to first take a long, hard look at your workflow and processes. If your processes only allow you to handle a certain amount of business without getting quickly  overwhelmed, it’s time to write out every single step in your process.

The method I recommend for doing this exercise is what I call quite simply the sticky note exercise. Take one sticky note for every single step in your process and line them up from left to right on a wall or a white board. The left side of the board is the start of your process, and the right hand side represents the signing and sending of the file. Once you have every step in your process represented via sticky notes, now it’s time to become detached.

What do I mean by detached? I mean that you have to do your best to become somebody else for 30 minutes or so. You have to try to step out of the role of appraiser in your own business and into the role of high paid efficiency consultant. You have to look at your workflow and processes as if you aren’t the one doing them every day, especially if you’ve been doing it the same way for many years. 

Detach from the process and start to ask yourself why you do each step the way you do. Then ask yourself is there a better and more efficient way to do that specific process. One of the most important set of questions you need to ask in this whole process is this set of 4 questions:

1. Can this step in the process be automated
2. Can this step in the process be delegated to somebody else?
3. Can this step in the process be eliminated?
4. Does this step in the process need me, specifically, to do it?
   1. If yes, why?

Go ahead, I dare you to try this process in your business and see if you don’t automate, eliminate, or delegate several of the sticky notes in your process. And, if you make it through the questions and find that you don’t automate, eliminate, or delegate anything on your list, either your system truly is perfect, or you’re simply stuck in the thinking that your system is perfect because that’s the way you’ve always done it and can’t imagine doing things differently.

I said earlier that one of the best prevention measure for burnout is a two-fold process. I just gave you the first part, which is to become more efficient at what you do, thus freeing up vital capacity, even if its only emotional capacity that you free up. Remember, the goal is to avoid burnout in all of this. If becoming more efficient and freeing up latent capacity is the first part, the second part is learning to say ‘no’ a lot more.

I know, I know…if you’re starving for business at the moment, you’re looking to say ‘yes’ to more orders. But, even in that situation, I’d bet a good portion of my income next year that I could find areas of your life and business that you could and should be saying no to, but haven’t, which is what has led you to where you are today.

Until you identify what you should be saying yes to and what you should be saying no to, you will always struggle and will inevitably burn out at some point.

So, if learning to become more efficient to avoid burnout is the first part of the two-fold process, the second part is understanding how values and priorities play a role. Without going too deeply on this part since it can be a whole separate podcast episode on its own, I’ll just say that, in my experience working with hundreds of appraisers over the years, and thousands over the last 2 and a half decades, most people prioritize all the wrong things and never decide what their values are so as to do work based on those values instead of just working on what’s on the schedule for today.

I can’t tell you how many times during an initial coaching call I ask, ‘so, tell me about your typical day and how you choose what you’re going to do that day’. The most common answer is, ‘I get up, turn on my computer, check emails for orders or revision requests, and then check my inspection schedule to see what I have that day’.

If I just described your day, you’re not operating based on your values, you’re operating based on the dictates of your calendar. In essence, you’re working for somebody else, despite all those times you pat yourself on the back for being an independent business owner.

You must take some time to decide what your values are as it relates to the types of clients you’ll work with and for, how you value time, how you value money, how you value family time and recreation time, and what you imagine for your future. 

If you want to stave off burnout in any profession, you must decide what you value and then make decisions based on those values, not just what’s on your calendar for that day.

The second cause of burnout after workload is a perceived lack of control and an unhealthy focus on what you believe is fair. This can manifest in a variety of ways, but most commonly for appraisers it manifests as anger and hostility towards external causes and entities like AMCs, the government, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and, as of the last few years, bigger companies like RSDS, True Footage, Opteon, and a couple others. 

As a business owner this is an ever-present set of circumstances that can easily eat away at your joy and the initial excitement you had when you first hung out your shingle and started your business. The reality is that there will always be external factors at play in every industry and profession that can lead one to feeling like they have no control. And, to some extent, there’s some truth in that lack of control.

You don’t have any control over what Fannie and Freddie decide to do. You have no control over what another company chooses to do. You have no control over what an AMC chooses to go to market with as far as strategy is concerned. Those things are all outside of your control. When we feel helpless against things outside of our control, it can lead to a sense of foreboding and anxiety. You want to throw up your hands and say, ‘I just can’t win against this so why even try’. And, in fact, we see a lot of that on social media these days. 

Friends, stop focusing on what you have zero control over and place your attention, your energy, and your focus on what you can control, which is yourself, your business model, your clientele, your market strategy, your attitude, your personality, your customer service, your product, your product offerings, your market mix, and your mindset. 

I can relate with this one intimately because I spent the better portion of the last 3 years trying to help build a great company and do things a little differently, only to realize just how little control I really had in making decisions and creating something new and different at that level.

If you don’t work for yourself and, instead, work for a corporation, I’ve come to the conclusion that you either have to kill all of your hopes and dreams of having some kind of impact in the world with your ideas, or never have those hopes and dreams in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, I know there are some great companies to work for around the globe. They treat their people with respect and compassion, they offer great pay and benefits, they try new things and take input from the frontline workers, they have a clear mission, strong core values, and a dynamic vision of where they want to be in the future and how they’re going to get there, but those companies are extremely few and far between. The vast majority of companies exist simply to make money and the people that work for those companies are cogs in a big wheel rolling in a direction for that purpose alone. The company just needs people carrying out specific functions and anything that slows down the production of those functions is a liability that will be removed.

Again, good people (most of them), good companies, but if you want to work for somebody else, it’s likely because you believe there is some value in trading some control, autonomy, independence, freedom, mobility, income, and having a voice for the perceived security of guaranteed income and benefits. When people who are wired to control their own destiny find themselves in an environment that isn’t suited to that, burn out can be one of the end results. Again, I know this intimately because I’m in the late stages of that burnout and just starting to get my groove back with more time and distance from that type of environment. 

Know your DNA and how you’re wired. If you’re wired like me and like to have some control over time, income, opportunity, vision, values, and the mission, be careful not to conflate lack of control over external factors with a complete lack of control over everything. Again, you don’t have control over the government, the elections, the policy, the interest rates, the AMCs, or the lenders, but you absolutely have control over yourself, your thinking, and the direction you and your business take on a day-to-day basis.

Avoid burning out by focusing on what you do have control over, what is predictable and duplicatable, and not on the things that are out of your control.

The third main cause of burnout, at least as it relates to our work and our businesses, is lack of vision, plain and simple. In fact, I heard another teacher teach on this point years ago and it hit me write in the feels. He said, (and I’m paraphrasing), ‘there is no such thing as burnout, there is simply a lack or loss of vision’.

When you have a vision of where you’re headed and, maybe more important than the where, why you’re headed there, you’re energized. When you have little to no vision of where you’re headed or why you’re going there, you inevitably lose that energy and eventually burn out. In essence, burn out is the symptom of something bigger. That something bigger is the vision, or lack thereof.

If you don’t know where you’re headed or why you’re headed there, why are you doing it? Is it just for the money? Is it because that’s all you know how to do? Is it because you’re in a financial position that doesn’t allow for any room to be creative or stopping for a bit to get your bearings, or maybe even starting something else? 

If the cause isn’t bigger than yourself and your own selfish pursuits, the end result will almost always be burnout. I’m not saying paying your bills isn’t an important cause. I’m not saying financial security isn’t a valuable cause. And I’m not telling you that if you don’t have a reason that’s bigger than you right now for why you’re an appraiser that you have to find something else to do. I’m simply telling you that, if you want to avoid burning out at the thing you do to earn income, have security, and provide for your family, then you must have a reason that for doing it that is bigger than those individual things.

Money is a great reason to do something, but it can also be the worst reason to do something. Security can be a great reason to do something, but it can also cost you far more than you think. And providing for your family can be all the reason you need to do something, but that will not guarantee that won’t burnout doing just that. And what good is choosing to do something for all those reasons if you’re doing it at the expense of your health and mental wellbeing.

The last thing I’ll say on this topic of burnout is that, one of the most vital components of avoiding burnout, developing and maintaining a strong vision and mission, and even recovering from burnout is community. The appraisal profession is an almost community-less profession. The vast majority of you are one or two person companies, you work alone, you ride solo most of the time, and, if you interact with anyone at all, it’s an agent over the phone, your virtual assistant working remotely, or the occasional assessor or zoning clerk. And that, my friends, is not community.

A community is a group of like-minded people coming together for a specific purpose and the way communities thrive is by taking care of each community member. The health and well-being of the community is more important than any one individual member, but when a member is down, the community knows the great value in taking care of each member.

There are a bunch of online communities for appraisers on Facebook. These are not, however, what I would call true communities as most of them are simply gathering places of unhappy people and a forum to rant about all of the external things outside of our control. Are there some good people in those communities? Of course! Are there some real jerks? By the hundreds! What tends to happen in that type of community’, however, is that the jerks tend to be the loudest and the rudest, so the rest of the community members stay silent, thus negating the main benefit of a community. 

Friends, if you want to be part of a community that is uplifting, supportive, vision and mission driven, a group of big thinkers, and people who are doing great things in their lives and in their businesses, you have a few options: you can try to find a local community of people that can help you do more, be more, and live more in the way you envision; you can create your own community of like-minded people that you who can be there for each other in the ways you need them to be, or you can join the Appraiser Increase Academy, which is exactly the kind of group we’ve been describing. It’s already built, it’s been active for many years, it’s filled with people doing way more than the average, it has monthly business building activities and coaching calls, weekly content uploads that are designed to help you grow in a variety of ways, and you can try it out absolutely free for a whole month to see if it’s the kind of community you’d like to be a part of.

As an added bonus for joining that community, you get 70+ hours of training and coaching videos, 15 coaching downloads that will help you identify, clarify, and ultimately amplify your life and business, and access to some of the smartest businesspeople you could know. If you want to have more money, margin, and meaning in your life and business, just go to www.coachblaine.com/freemonth and check it out.