If your work depends on you, looking after yourself isn’t a luxury. It’s part of the job.

I was sitting with a friend recently and we got talking about work. He has a demanding job with a huge amount of responsibility, and he told me about the hours he has been working. Some days can be incredibly long. Six days a week can easily become seven when things are particularly busy, and the pressure doesn’t necessarily disappear when he eventually gets home. His team is stretched, and he isn’t the only one finding things difficult. As we talked, I found myself thinking about something I see with business owners too.

At what point does working hard become working too hard?

We wear being busy like a badge of honor

Ask a business owner how things are going and one of the most common answers you’ll hear is:

“Busy!”

Usually, that’s said as though it’s automatically a good thing. Of course, we all have busy periods, I’ve certainly had plenty myself. There will be times when a deadline needs meeting, a client needs extra help or something unexpected happens and we have to put in additional hours. But there is a difference between having a busy week and working at an unsustainable level month after month, eventually something has to give.

And very often, the first thing we sacrifice is ourselves.

Burnout doesn’t just affect you

Burnout can creep up gradually. You might become exhausted or irritable. You may struggle to concentrate or find that decisions that would normally be straightforward become harder. You might even start losing enthusiasm for the business you once loved running, and it doesn’t necessarily stop when you leave the office. If you’re permanently tired, stressed or distracted by work, the people around you can feel the effects too.

Your partner, family, friends and employees all experience a version of you that might be very different from the person you want to be. For a business owner, there’s another important question:

What happens to your business if you suddenly can’t be there?

If everything relies on you and your health forces you to stop working for a few weeks, or longer, what happens?

Who looks after your clients?

Who makes the decisions?

Who knows what needs doing?

Who keeps the business moving?

We spend a lot of time protecting businesses from financial risks, but sometimes we forget about one of the biggest risks of all.

Us.

Sometimes you just need a sounding board

This is something that comes up in my own mentoring conversations with business owners. Often, someone doesn’t come to me with a neatly defined problem and ask for the answer. They might simply say: “I’ve got too much going on.” and we start talking.

What’s taking up your time?

What are you worried about?

What are you doing because you’ve always done it?

What could someone else take responsibility for?

What would happen if you said no occasionally?

And, importantly:

What do you actually want your business and your life to look like?

My role as a mentor isn’t to tell someone how they should run their business or their life, I see myself much more as a sounding board. I listen, ask questions, share my own experiences where they’re useful and sometimes challenge the assumptions that a business owner has made. Quite often, the answer is already there, they’ve just been too busy to stop and find it.

Creating some breathing space

There isn’t one magic solution to burnout, and sometimes circumstances aren’t entirely within our control, but there are things worth looking at.

Delegate more.
Do you genuinely need to do everything you’re currently doing?

Set some boundaries.
Not every email needs answering tonight. Not every phone call needs returning immediately. Not every problem is an emergency.

Protect time away from work.
An evening, a weekend, exercise, walking the dog or spending time with family. Whatever works for you, give yourself permission to properly switch off.

Look at your team and systems.
If your business can’t function without you for a few days, perhaps that’s something that needs addressing.

Talk to someone.
This is a big one for me.

Having regular time with someone away from the daily noise of the business can be incredibly valuable, it’s one of the reasons I have my own business coach, and it’s something I try to provide for the people I mentor. Sometimes an hour spent talking through what’s going on can save weeks of worrying about it, and if stress, exhaustion or low mood is becoming difficult to manage, speaking to a GP or appropriate mental-health professional is important. Mentoring can provide a useful sounding board for the business pressures behind the problem, but it isn’t a replacement for professional healthcare.

An hour to work on you and your business

One of the things I’ve noticed through mentoring business owners is how rarely they give themselves dedicated time to think. Their diary is full of customers, employees, suppliers, emails, meetings and deadlines, everyone gets some of their time, except them. A mentoring session creates a bit of space.

No emails. No employees interrupting. No customer on the phone. Just an opportunity to sit down and talk honestly about what’s happening. Sometimes we’ll talk about workload, sometimes it’s employees, finances, growth, confidence, difficult decisions or where the business is heading next, and sometimes several of those things are connected.

I’m not there with a standard checklist or a magic formula, every business owner is different. The important thing is giving someone the opportunity to step outside their business for an hour, look back in and ask:

Is the way I’m doing this actually working for me?

I’ve had to learn this myself

I’m certainly not writing this as someone who has always had the perfect work-life balance, far from it. Over the past few years, I’ve had to look carefully at my own role within Swan Saunders. I’ve recently reached a point where my team now take responsibility for our compliance work, allowing me to spend more time working with clients, developing the business and growing my coaching and mentoring work. Getting there has meant learning to delegate, trust other people and accept that I don’t need to be involved in everything.

My own business coach has played an important part in that process. Having someone challenge me and ask the questions I sometimes didn’t want to ask myself has made a huge difference. It’s also helped shape the way I mentor other business owners.

Success needs to include you

When I mentor someone, I’m interested in their business goals, but I’m also interested in what achieving those goals means for the person running the business. More turnover isn’t much fun if you’re working seven days a week to achieve it, and taking on more clients isn’t necessarily progress if you’re already overwhelmed.

Employing more people won’t automatically make life easier if you haven’t thought about how you’re going to manage them. Sometimes business development is about growth, sometimes it’s about creating a business that gives you more freedom, not less.

There’s always going to be another email.

Another client.

Another deadline.

Another opportunity.

But there is only one you.

Building a successful business shouldn’t come at the expense of your health, relationships or happiness, and sometimes one of the most productive things you can do isn’t to work another three hours.

It’s to spend an hour with someone who will listen, challenge your thinking and help you find a better way forward

Glenn’s Notebook – Business, life and everything in between.