📍 If you are carrying fatigue and resentment into your Monday morning, even when you technically love your job, this episode is for you. 📍 You're gonna learn how to reconcile systemic issues and problems with your own workplace culture and then your own personal development altogether. While loving your job doesn't protect you from nervous system fatigue, and how the dull the difference between needing rest and then needing.

Reorientation and why so much advice kind of becomes more confusing or unhelpful

when it comes to burnout. The question isn't how do I make sure that I'm doing something that I love, so that I always have energy and I never feel like I'm working a day in my life? It's not how do I decrease my workload or how do I manage my stress? It's actually more what type of weight are you carrying and.

Which one do you need to like pull the lever on supporting first? So we've got systemic weight. We're talking about inequities, cost of living, increasing environmental stresses, unfair structures that make life harder for some than for others. We've got culture. Leadership patterns where you work, um, your colleagues, how safe you feel to work up, how recognized you feel, how much it feels like you're, um, making a change, going to work and having purpose.

Feeling like you're making a difference, feeling like you're valued, feeling like you're respected, um, how feedback is given or not given, uh, how. You feel like your career might develop or you're supported in this phase of your life, and then we have you. We have your nervous system, your body, your emotions that point you towards your desires, the specific way that your mind works, the way that your energy works, the way everything about you that is really unique to you.

And sometimes we think that the tension we're feeling at work is our boss, but it's actually our own self-doubt or our own conditioning speaking. Sometimes we think it's us, but it's actually the fact that we are in a toxic, unsustainable culture, and at the same time, we've got these large systems that kind of drain energy and there's in a way that no amount of self-care or self-development can solve.

What I'm inviting to you today is a correct and more effective method of inquiry. If I can help you ask the right questions, then. You're gonna be able to be more likely to create a role and a schedule that aligns with your nervous system. So instead of asking, why can't I, I keep up, or why can't I just feel the way that I wanna feel?

We wanna ask, well, what is weighing so heavy and what lever will I pull first?

Before we go there, I just recently created a burnout is weird, PDF, where I took seven stories of seven different clients who are all have sensitive systems or they have a DHD or they live with like trauma complex PTSD, anxiety or depression. Um, and they're working in entrepreneurship or in an office or some type of hybrid type of role and how we, the exact steps that we've taken to.

Um, get them feeling back like themselves. But some of them are kind of weird and maybe a little bit unexpected or they're just different. Uh, so I put them all in A PDF. You can download it, uh, at sheridan ruth.com/protocol. It's actually really cool. I think you will like it and it's very practically helpful, but also deep.

Anyway, so that is there for you. You can download that while you're listening. But before we get into kind of the fix, right, like what to do with feeling, having and frustrated, and turn that into feeling aligned and happy, and in a role, in a schedule that you love. I wanna normalize something which is that loving your work does not immunize you from feeling fatigued by it.

In fact, sometimes. Being in a role that you're passionate about and you know this, right? Like you, that feeling that drive actually can hide or mask the deeper underlying capacity concerns that are kind of like eroding your energy because it doesn't feel like burnout when you're doing work you love, right?

Wasn't supposed to. Uh, and your mind works really fast and your heart is really big. So you can do a lot. You see a lot. You want to, but your body doesn't really care how passionate you are if you're carrying weight that is not yours to hold or that you haven't resolved or figured out, or if you're ignoring deeper parts of yourself, deeper needs, deeper desires.

So we've got, like I said, just to elaborate on it, the system, the culture, and then you. And if you're gonna change the way that your body orients the world or the culture at your work, or the culture that you lead, or the system you're going to need energy and need, needing energy means tending to the energy that you already have inside of you.

And kind of like, let's just say like optimizing it or freeing it up, processing it, like orienting it to the way that it's going to be most effective. Most of us feel aligned, satisfied, successful at work when we know that we're using our energy in an effective way. That's kind of it, right? And then you end Friday and you feel like you still have energy for the weekend, so you're using your energy as well for your community, for your kids, for things that matter.

That's what we want.

I really like the way that Emily and Amelia Nki explain processing energy and processing emotions in their book called burnout. You might have heard of it when you think about the nervous system as completing the stress cycle. So it's an understanding that your body goes through challeng. Experiences and we kind of need to complete that cycle.

Think of it like throughout the day, you might experience like something that kind of puts energy in your body. It's arousing. Maybe it's just a challenge, or maybe you get something that you're excited about and the way that that energy is created to move through your body is, it kind of goes through a wave.

It's like, oh my God, this is happening. Ah, yeah. Okay, cool. Like, let me, let me focus on that. Let me raise my voice. Let me attune to a person. Let me. Think about it, there's a activation of energy inside of your body that lightens your brain, lights your brain up, and it puts you into some type of focus or might be on focus on something that is painful.

It might be focused on something that is pleasurable. Kind of depends on a couple of things, but we have this arousal that occurs and them. What should happen is it should kind of like arrive to a peak and then we sh we in when it's done, let's just say correctly, but there's no right or wrong. When it's done kind of effectively, we'll arrive at like a completion of that.

So you can liken that to, you saw a bear, you wanted to run away from the bear, you ran very fast. There was lots of energy in your body. You realized that you ran away from the bed. You looked at your friend who was with you and like, oh my God, we just did that. That's why like you'll have a day at work.

Where something will happen and you're like, oh, okay, challenge. And then you'll complete it. You'll feel pretty competent while you're completing it. You'll get to the end, you'll look at it and you'll be like, damn, I'm really proud of that. We did really good. And you'll come back from that day of work and you'll be like, wow, that was really satisfying.

I felt really good about that. That was a good day. Um, you might be a little bit tired, but not depleted. Like that was good. That's really what we're looking for. That's that energy of flow. I liken it so much to like an orgasm. It's like, oh, oh yeah. Like, oh, okay, good. So. Yeah, there is stress, like, stress that occurs in that process.

It's the same as anything hard. It's a little bit difficult. There's a, eh, but what happens a all the time Is that because of a schedule or because it triggers a deep memory or because, uh, I don't know, like you get distracted. Like so many different things are structurally set up where we don't walk through that cycle.

Incompletion. Sometimes we start different types of cycles. You're bombarded with lots of different things and they all have different reactions in your body. You really can only do one of them, even though your mind and your heart might wanna do eight of them, uh, or we can't address it for whatever reason.

And that kind of gets like put inside of your body to be dealt with at a different time. Different books speak about this a lot. I think the, the best one to read is, um. The body keeps the score. But essentially it's this understanding of like, your body is take keeping track of every experience. I don't have to convince you of this.

You, you feel this, you know this. So what happens is when we are burnt out or we feel frustrated or resented or resentful, it just means that we haven't completed that cycle. When we are unmotivated, we haven't completed that cycle. That cycle is oftentimes. An emotional cycle. It can be energetic. It depends kind of how you resonate with that, but it's through movement and breath and connection to that, that we arrive on the other side.

If we don't do that, it feels stuck and you start to experience the symptoms of that feeling heavy feeling like the weekend isn't enough anymore, like wanting three day, four day five day six days, 78 day weekends. Um. Feeling like, it's like you're kind of like slugging up a hill to get somewhere and feeling like you're repeating the same, maybe like problems or discomfort.

So what we wanna do instead is we wanna process that energy for simplicity. I'm gonna call that emotions today, which is energy in motion in your body. In my work, I like to call this emotional alchemy inside of my book, somatic Intelligence for Success, chapter Six. That is a practice that you can learn, uh, but there are so many different ways to do it.

I'm gonna share with you two different ways that I have clients that have done it really effectively. Uh, so you can kind of feel into what is the correct way for you to do it and what your body might be telling you or trying to teach you from this. Like, I suppose symptom of not fill in 100% on a Monday morning.

So I'm calling the person A and person B because I'm on my period. Well, I'm about to be, and I couldn't get more creative. So person A, she came to me when she was like. I feel like I'm on autopilot. I just kind of like go through the day. I tick off my to-do list. I just like go from one thing to the other.

At the end of the day, my brain is completely dead. I have no capacity. I feel overwhelmed, and I just feel like I'm not giving enough energy to my kids and my husband and I just, I don't feel good. So she started with that. Emotional alchemy practice that I talked to you about, uh, inside of Somatic Intelligence, my book, I taught her that and we got really good at figuring out what was happening in her body.

This was really important because she had maybe a dissociative tendency, so she had, had times before in her life where she had felt like she was kind of observing herself and not. Experiencing life. So she felt kind of like out of body, like she wasn't really herself. It was really easy for her to feel very disconnected from other people and from herself.

So this meant that she got very good at, at feeling and understanding and just getting the nitty gritty and the the density and the flavor and the texture of emotion and sensation inside of her body. From there, when she was able to ask the question to that sensation of, do you just need to be moved?

Like what do you need? Or are you telling me is there something that I need to know about this? Like, what does this energy need and want? A lot of the time what she found was it just needed to move. She just needed to move her body, and so. She just needed to like see that emotion and move her body. So she would go to the work, go to the gym after work, she would acknowledge, okay, I've got some emotions.

The emotions I'm feeling are frustration, sadness, hopeful. Disappointment. Gratitude. Okay, cool. This is what's inside. And then she would forget about it. She would pick some music and she would move her body and that was it. And that was enough for her to feel like she was seeing herself and that emotion was being moved through her body.

And sometimes, you know. She did tell me about a time where she was like on the doing some bicep something and she did have a tear kind of come out and she realized how strong she was and she felt very connected. Whereas before when she'd gone to the gym, she felt like she was just doing it because she had to, and that was wonderful for her.

Sometimes she actually got that emotional processing more through. Being with friends, but she had to learn the difference between surface level kind of venting and bitching that was keeping her stuck in the same fault loops and was just not productive or satisfying, versus being like, oh, I'm experiencing these emotions.

I just need to get them out. Like I don't need anything else. And I don't wanna go super big into the story. I don't wanna complain or anything, but I'm feeling this way. Which was great because it actually helped her feel so much closer with her girlfriends as well. But what's key in this is that she was not identifying with the story and the thoughts that her emotion was giving her.

She was just asking, oh, what is present? What emotion is inside of me? How does that want to be processed? And then she's automatically not on autopilot. Just through that massive changes, way more energy. She ended up staying in the same like role, uh, and super, super happy. That was kind of, that was kind of it, to be honest.

Then we have person B, 'cause once again, I couldn't think of her name. She kind of came feeling like no matter what I do at work, I'm gonna fail. And she was also entrepreneur. So it's like no matter what I do, it's not enough. It's like, it's not enough. I'm gonna fail. Tell me if you felt that one before. I resonate well with this one.

, So she was always asking for feedback. From her, coworkers. And then in her audience, when she was working for herself, she was like always doing market research and always testing and always like, oh, is this right? And it meant that it was really hard for her to make money or make any progress because when you're always like checking in, is this right?

Number one, you don't come across as confident. So I like why would anyone want to give you their money and help that you're supposed to be the expert, right? . Number two, her colleagues were starting to get a little bit frustrated with her and they were like, you need to do your job. What was interesting is here we found that it wasn't so much about her, her emotions kind of being like they just seemed to be processed.

They were actually signaling deeper need. So she was really looking for financial security, career direction, and also confidence. The confidence to say, this is what I believe, this is what I believe is correct. Yeah, so a lot of what we did focused more on figuring out what was the feedback from that emotion telling us about her values and her needs.

When we went into that, we found that she really valued career money and one of the things that she did was like set up plans for that to happen and she also. , Learned to ask for feedback a little less frequently, but she was able to advocate for herself and say, Hey, I'm gonna practice asking less, but when I do it means that I actually really need it.

So she learned to use her emotions more as a compass to what she really needs and what she really values. So I'll affirm. So much of burnout, recovery, and sustainable work is not about fixing or doing or creating. It's just about listening differently and asking better questions. So that is my invitation for you today.

Download the burnout is weird protocol, and yeah, go and explore some other episodes. I will speak with you soon. Bye.