Breaking Free from Burnout: Real Talk for Dentists with Dr. Scott Leune

The podcast episode “The Struggle is Real: Dealing with Burnout” dives into the multifaceted causes, manifestations, and strategies for managing burnout in the dentistry profession. Hosted by Dr. Richard Low and Dr. Scott Leune, the discussion emphasizes how burnout impacts personal and professional life, offering insights into recognizing and addressing it effectively.

Key Highlights:

• Understanding Burnout: Dr. Scott explains that burnout in dentistry arises from various sources, such as overburdened schedules, financial pressures, physical exhaustion, and difficulties in managing relationships within the workplace. He highlights how it often shows up as emotional and psychological stress, including depression, anxiety, and a sense of being trapped.
• The Vicious Cycle: According to Scott, burnout often leads dentists to counterproductive responses like overworking, making impulsive decisions, or delaying necessary changes. These reactions only deepen the challenges and perpetuate the cycle of stress.
• Personal and Professional Interplay: The discussion underscores how burnout doesn’t stay confined to professional life. Dr. Scott and Dr. Richard discuss how it can spill into personal areas, leading to neglect of health, family, friendships, and hobbies, leaving individuals disconnected from their sense of purpose.
• Solutions and Strategies: Dr. Scott advocates for a holistic reset, addressing both personal and professional domains. He recommends practical steps such as creating boundaries, improving physical well-being, and dedicating time to meaningful relationships. Additionally, he suggests tackling root causes of stress in the workplace by making bold, necessary decisions.
• Coaching as a Lifeline: The conversation highlights the importance of coaching as a way to gain clarity and external perspective. Dr. Scott emphasizes that coaching helps remove friction points in a dental practice and provides emotional support, making it easier to navigate out of burnout.
• Reframing Burnout: According to Dr. Scott, burnout can be a turning point. Rather than seeing it as a setback, he suggests using it as an opportunity to change direction, address underlying issues, and pursue a more balanced, purpose-driven life and career.

The hosts ultimately stress the importance of treating burnout as a wake-up call. Dr. Scott advises listening to these signals and taking decisive action to embark on a new, fulfilling journey that aligns with long-term goals and values.

Here is a full transcript of the video

Dr. Richard Low:    

Welcome back to The Shared Practices Podcast. I have with me my co-host, Dr. Scott Leune, who is going to talk to us today, we’re going to have a discussion around something that is absolutely more universal than anyone cares to admit, which is burnout in dentistry. People who are crushed by the stressors that present themselves with, even if you don’t own a dental practice, practicing dentistry, but especially as a practice owner. So, Scott, I can’t imagine that you’re speaking from any sort of personal experience. You’ve never been stressed in dentistry, have you?

Identifying the Signs of Burnout

Dr. Scott Leune:       

I love the sarcasm. I think that I and a whole lot of other people wear the scars that we’ve experienced from these stresses in dentistry. Really, the way I look at it is if you see that dentistry is an enemy in your life in some way, then you are experiencing burnout. If they’re the enemy of time. They’re the enemy of happiness. They’re the enemy of physical stress or of emotional stress. You are basically being trapped in some way by dentistry, in a way, of course, that is negative. Then we are experiencing an aspect of avoidable burnout, avoidable burnout.

And this burnout, this feeling that we get starts making us react in weird ways. We start making really irrational decisions that go against better judgment, that go against the life journey we want to have. Sometimes our reactions to burnout is to work more, to work harder, to white-knuckle through the burnout, and that just steals everything else in our life. Or, sometimes the reaction to our burnout is to quit. Or, sometimes we’re trying to quit by working more. We’re like, “I want to quit doing dentistry, so let me go own 10 practices.” And we just trade one kind of burnout for another, and it’s just very illogical. We need to figure out best practices on managing our careers so that burnout doesn’t manage our careers.

Dr. Richard Low:    

That management of burnout, I think sometimes there’s not even an awareness of it. It’s like it creeps in and can feel insidious. It manifests itself as depression, as anxiety, as resentment, as anger towards our team. Sometimes even the people we love, our family, can get this sense of this is what we really care about and they’re in the way because we express things like that of like, “Well, I need to be working more. I need to be handling these issues and then I can be more present with you guys.”

I’ve seen burnout quite a bit. For me, one of the signs is, do you feel trapped by dentistry or by your situation? That is a sign of, “I’m feeling burned out and I feel like the walls are closing in.” So, there’s all these little signs of it and it can manifest in these different ways, but I want to hear your thoughts on the causes of burnout.

What are the ways that this shows up for people in an unhealthy way? It turns from being a healthy, motivating stressor, it’s like, I’ve come into all-on-four surgeries in a mode of like, “Okay, we’ll see how this goes, and there’s probably going to be challenges. Things are probably going to go wrong, but I’m kind of excited to figure out how the surgery is going to go.” There can be a healthy amount of, “I’m excited to grow a practice. I’m excited to come into work. I’m excited to tackle the challenges,” and all of a sudden it flips to being crippling stress and crippling anxiety around that. So, where do you see that coming in and where’s that coming from?

Causes of Burnout

Dr. Scott Leune:       

I can think of a handful right now. I’ll list them. As I list these things out loud, there’s the non-dental component of it that so often gets blended in. So, our personal life can contribute to us feeling burned out at work, or our work can be stealing aspects we need in our personal life. There’s this just kind of mix that happens, right? Because we don’t live in just these silos, it all impacts each other.

But where can this burnout originate from? I think that one area burnout can come from is the schedule, the day-to-day schedule of doing dentistry. Also, the yearly schedule of how many days, how many weeks, many months am I doing dentistry? Those are two different schedules. Right? The yearly schedule says, “When am I basically taking off?” The day-to-day schedule is really kind of looking at the measure of stress of processing patients that day. So, how fast am I having to go? How many things am I having to juggle? And how many breakdowns are we having in a day? Those are two completely separate things, but they’re both scheduled. They’re both about us being in the office doing dentistry. I think that’s one source.

I guess, I’ll list a few others real quick and we can figure out what we’re talking about. But another source would be a financial source. If we are having a lack of profits or a lack of income, whether we’re an owner or not, if there’s not extra money being created by our career, then that can contribute to burnout because we feel trapped, we feel lost, we don’t know where to go, how to make the more money that we need, and now we’re just working hard and it’s not what we expected, it’s not what we need. That is all sourced from just the fact that we’re not financially successful. Had we been financially successful, might be better for us to justify the work we were doing. But now that we’re not financially successful, we’re allowing the work we’re doing to create this feeling of burnout. Right? So, there’s that second source, money.

Another source is people, managing people. Whether again, we own the practice or not, we’re having to deal with and manage people, and that people management for some of us can really drain us. I think that’s another area of burnout.

Another one is the physical side of dentistry. Some of us are getting burned out because we’re having back problems and neck issues and problems in our hands. And that can spin out of control because we end up feeling this pain all day, every day, and that causes us to now start feeling very burned out by our profession. So, we got the physical, we got the people, we got, I want to say profits, we’ve got the schedule. And that is ignoring the personal side.

The Interplay Between Personal and Professional Life

Dr. Richard Low:    

Can I address the personal side a little bit here?

Dr. Scott Leune:       

Yeah.

Dr. Richard Low:    

So, I mean, I’ve just had, in the last month and a half I’ve had about 70 conversations with very burned out dentists and specifically fathers. I’ve started a men’s group for dentists who are burned out, and a lot of these things that you just brought up have come up, but one of the commonalities is, “How am I reacting to stress and what am I sacrificing?” And usually in reaction to all of these stressors, we stop prioritizing our physical health and working out. We become a little bit disconnected from our spouse, from our kids. We tend to not have real friendships. It’s like I go play golf with my buddies, but we talk about everything other than the actual stuff that we care about. Maybe faith used to be important to me, but now it just feels like there’s not enough time. And there isn’t as much purpose in all of these things.

And so, ironically, so many sacrifices get made in undergrad to get into dental school, in dental school to get through or to get into residency, and then to get to the point where you can own a practice, and then to build and scale a practice. And at some point, you can look back at 15 years of your life and realize, “What am I actually doing all of this for?” And so, I think that is another aspect of the burnout is we have invested our whole heart and soul into building a dental practice because, like in our last episode it was student loans or the possibility of a better life for our family.

There’s these really good things, but then also we wrap in all of our trauma, all of the things that we’re doing that we’re not proud of, our addictions to avoid feeling the stress because when you come home at the end of the day and your wife asks, “What happened at work today?” And you’re like … Your husband asks, “How were things with the team, with the patients?” And you don’t even know where to begin because you’re like, “I don’t want to relive the trauma of today. All of the things that went wrong between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM.” I think that’s where there is this intersection of all of the stressors that are produced in dentistry and our unhealthy ways of coping and our sacrifices that we make for years and years and years and years is the perfect storm for all the burnout that we see.

Dr. Scott Leune:       

Yeah. You listed a really cool list. I don’t know if you realize it, but you said, “We ignore our health. We sacrifice our friendships. We sacrifice our faith. We sacrifice our relationships with our spouse and with maybe our family.” And so, if we’re feeling burnout and our response is to sacrifice, who are we becoming? I mean, are you letting burnout make you a jerk to your friends, make you fat and unhealthy and unattractive? Are you throwing away your sex life with your spouse or any sort of deep connection with your family? Have you thrown away your faith? You feel like your compass is broken? Burnout can be at the foundation of all of those types of things.

Resetting Priorities and Finding Balance

And is burnout happening in the dental practice? So often we say it is. Maybe burnout’s actually happening on the personal side somewhere, and the stresses of us make us less effective as a dentist or as manager, as a CEO. We’ve actually compromised dentistry in the name of our personal burnout. It’s all blended together. If we were to kind of say, “This next year is going to be a reset for us,” so many times we’re more effective when we decide to reset a lot of categories at once than if we just reset one category. Because if we can just work out a little bit every day, maybe get a personal trainer, half an hour a day or hour a day. And if we can just date our spouse once a week. And we can just schedule that we’re going to leave work an hour earlier than what we’re used to every day and we’re going to actually play with our kids for that hour. And we are going to have one friend’s night out a month, but we’re actually going to freaking schedule it.

We’re going to use the skills that we have, that got us into dental school, the skills that got us through dental school, those skills of delaying gratification, of organization, of doing things with intent, and we’re going to apply those skills to now kind of resetting these different components of our life. We have them, we can do it. Suddenly, we have a dramatic change in who we become. We start becoming healthy. We start becoming desirable and friendly and we start having energy , emotional energy to address these things.

This is a dental podcast, right? We’re supposed to be talking about teeth and everything that goes on in the tooth building, but we can’t ignore the fact that burnout has the ultimate personal price that we’re seeing. I love looking at the practice and saying, “Here’s how we remove the stressors, the friction. Here’s how we remove the sources of burnout. Here’s how you change the schedule.” Right? “Here’s how you change how you manage people. Here’s how we increase profits.” That’s where I like to focus on. That’s just how I am. There’s a whole lot of people that are not like me, and they need to talk about and understand the life side of things, the things that you love talking about. Does any of that make sense?

Dr. Richard Low:

Absolutely. And like you said, sometimes it’s easier to change both than to change just one or neither. Comprehensive change of, “What are the decisions I’m not looking at?” And I think that’s actually one final practice stressor that maybe we didn’t talk about is, “Do I need to do something really difficult to do in my practice that I’m avoiding making that decision? So, do I need to let a team member go? Do I need to make a big pivot in what we’re focusing on and the direction of the practice overall?” And sometimes we don’t have the perspective to do that, and this pressure of something hard we’re avoiding can bleed into all the other areas of the practice and our personal life.

And I’ll give an example, and I’ve shared it a little bit before. I got to the point where I was losing a bunch of money in a denture and implant practice and my marketing efforts weren’t working. It was a slow season of the year. I was burning through reserves, working capital, getting down to the bottom, and someone with an outside perspective told me, “Do you know what you really need to do?” And I had asked for this feedback, and they said, “You need to let a doctor go. You need to go back and be full-time clinical, and you need to close your second location.” And those were all three decisions that I was really not wanting to make, because it was going to affect this doctor and his family. It was going to be hard to admit that buying these two locations, actually I’m closing one of the two, it was going to be hard for me to step back in full-time clinical when I was feeling stressed out and burned out around clinical.

So, sometimes the not making of the decision we need to make within our practice, because we don’t have perspective on what needs to be done, can be one of the greatest stressors that spirals to both the things within and outside of the practice. And that is where having a third party, having someone else who can understand the nuances of your situation and look at things and give you objective advice, that is so invaluable. But most dentists who do it alone, who DIY, no one else knows what their practice looks like. No one else knows their numbers. No one else knows the direction they’re trying to go and the obstacles that are preventing them from getting there. And so, this is the layers of all of these sources of burnout and how they can be connected together. So, that decision-making, procrastinating a difficult decision or not being able to see a difficult decision, how do you feel about that as an additional source of burnout?

Dr. Scott Leune:       

Well, I think that your story makes it seem like you solved your problem by letting go of a dentist, closing a location, and doing dentistry clinically. That wasn’t your solution. The thing that actually solved your burnout issue or solved your problem was that you opened up to someone else coaching you. That was actually your solution. When you think about aspects of life that are not ideal, we’re not masters of, those are the aspects of life we need coaching.

The Role of Coaching in Overcoming Burnout

You look at athletes, if I’ve got a star NBA player, you can bet I’m going to have a coach just for their free throws. You can bet I’m going to actually have multiple coaches working on them. I’m going to have a coach just for their workout sessions, right? A personal trainer. I’m going to have a food coach, meaning we are going to use nutritionists and make them meals that they need to eat. We are going to have multiple types of coaches optimizing this athlete. That would be the most responsible thing I could do.

That’s for someone else. Well, shoot, what are we doing for ourselves? We need a coach in our practice to help us see what we don’t see, to say what needs to be said, and to give us the accountability to make the next steps we need to make. Sometimes, practice coaches are used mainly to train staff and to help you implement some new system or process. Right? Sometimes, it’s the opposite, practice coaches are there purely for the big picture. “What are you doing? You need to drop that, or do this, or close this location.” But many times, a practice coach is going to be in the middle, dealing with a lot of those different issues as stressors build up in a dentist’s life.

I think if a dentist is feeling burned out or if a dentist isn’t feeling as healthy or fit as they have been ,or if their marriage isn’t as strong as it was in the past, those are all indicators that you need coaching. You might need marital coaching, you might need training coaching, or food. You might need dental practice coaching. What I hear when I hear your story of here we’ve got a dentist feeling burned out, stressed, and what you actually need to do, just the thought of doing it is more stress. And so, you don’t do it. You’re already burned out, right? Just the thought of doing it is more stress.

And you almost get to this point where you say to yourself, “I’ve just done everything I can do.” Well, what you should ask yourself, and a coach actually told this to me, by the way, a coach outside of dentistry, instead of saying, “I’ve done everything I can do.” You should say, “Have you done everything that could be done?” That’s a different question. “Have you done everything that could be done to alleviate these areas that are burning us out, burning you out?”

And this is another thing the same coach said to me, when you say, “I don’t have time,” what you should be saying is, “I haven’t made it a priority.” Right? And so, if we want to make a priority, our life, our career, our health, if we want to take away these moments of burnout, we must do everything that could be done. And I think the solution for so many people is coaching.

Now, the people that aren’t feeling burned out, they are doing well. They’ve got the energy, they’ve got the drive, they can self-improve, right? Self-improvement. They’re already showing up to work out every day. Adding a trainer or coach for them is not going to be a big deal, but for a whole lot of other people, without a trainer they don’t even work out. So, it’s like where are you in your different life components, your relationships, your marriage or your spouse, your significant other? Where are you with health? Where are you on the business side of your practice, the financial side of your practice, and the clinical side of your practice? You might have clinical coaches. So, where you’re strong and not burned out, you have self-improvement possible, but where you are burned out, probably the best thing to do is to get a coach to help you become a new version of yourself, a reset.

Dr. Richard Low:    

And with that, the thing that you can do with a coach … And I love these very specific examples and these lessons that you’ve carried with you of like, “My coach said this and it changed my perspective for the rest of my life.” The other thing that coaching provides, and I think is an antidote to burnout of whatever kind, is a space to be honest and to share, “Here are all the problems,” and lay it all out and look at it. When we’re trying to manage burnout, I think one of the defaults is to shove it all down. Is just like, okay, power through, ignore. Try not to feel these things.

A practice coach is going to look at the whole situation with you and you can be honest, “Here are my fears. Here are my failings and weaknesses. Here are the things I want to improve on. Here are my strengths.” Having an accounting of all of that, but also having the space to say the things that you’re afraid to tell anyone, “Here are my fears. Here’s what I’m worried about. This practice is going to go this direction and this is how it’s going to affect my life. If I keep going this direction, I’m going to burn out and want to quit dentistry or I’m not going to be able to scale. I’m not going to be able to achieve my goals.” If you never say those things, the fears, your limiting beliefs, you can’t have someone help you work through them. So, I don’t know if that is resonating with you, but that’s something that has helped my progress quite a bit, is a space to say things that I’ve been embarrassed to say to other people.

Dr. Scott Leune:       

I visualize a lot of things in my life and I’m kind of visualizing burnout as like we’re in a completely dark maze of a cave and we don’t know where to go. And on top of that, we’re having to carry a ton of bricks. And at times we feel lost. At times we feel exhausted. That’s burnout. We don’t feel sure that we’re going to actually end up where we want to be, but we barely have any energy. It’s almost like, “Well, we just got to keep on pulling this and kind of go that way. Someday, I’m sure maybe it’ll get better.” And that’s what I visualize here.

And when I think about back to coaching, it’s almost like coaching could be a person in front of us that has a lamp and they’re reaching out their hand to help us pull the weight and go in the right direction. And when we can see where we’re going and someone else is telling us, “You can do this,” and they’re actually helping us get rid of some of these bricks. They’re like helping us with the logical aspect of the plan. Right? That alone, while it may not seem like a big deal, could actually be everything.

That person could be a therapist kind of person that we can be honest with, like you’re talking about. That helps us get rid of some of the emotional bricks. It could also instead be a very tactical person, right? That is just going to say, “Look, turn this, turn that. Drop this, drop that. And you can do this and I’m going to help you.” Right? Very tactical. All of those things help take away the friction points of our situation. The friction that’s heating up and causing this burnout, these moments of friction. And when we heat up and we start burning, that’s when we start compromising these other components.

I think if someone’s feeling burnout, that is the universe screaming at you, “You must change.” But you’re in a very difficult part of your life where you may not feel like you have the energy or the time to change. So, you need to have a coach, coach you through it. You need to have someone help you. You need help. Once you’re at burnout, you need help. You don’t typically have it in you to get out of it. You’ve burned it out. You’ve burned out your ability to get out of it. You need help, therapist, a spouse, a friend, a coach. You need help. You can’t at that point always trust yourself because you might actually fall into a trap that you don’t get out of for the rest of your career.

That’s a difficult … You fast-forward 20 years that way, and you’re looking at people that are not healthy in their life, in so many ways they’re not healthy. And they’re bitter, they’re resentful, too. Resentful of dentistry, resentful of relationships, resentful of money. That’s kind of how I see it or how I visualize it.

Dr. Richard Low:

I’ve seen dentists implode their lives in a lot of ways. Whether someone is taking 25 Percocets in the morning, they’ve gotten up to that point where they’re pretty much immune to opioids and they need them just to function. Whether it’s drinking themselves to sleep every night. Whether it’s acting against their values, going outside their marriage. It’s checking out their parenting. There’s so many signs.

But I would say if you’re feeling disconnected, unhappy, imploding, you probably need both things. You probably need to get someone who can tactically show you and ease the burden of ownership and of dentistry, and you need to figure out how to reboot on the personal side and reprioritize. And the people who have the capacity to do this themselves are often not the ones burned out because as you said, you’ve burned out your capacity to self-manage and to see the way on your own.

So, what are the next steps? If someone is like, “Okay, this is me. This is me in my life right now.” I have offered this quite a bit recently, and even yesterday I had a discussion with a dentist who’s having panic attacks going into the office because of the situation he’s in. I tell people, “Reach out to me on Facebook or Instagram. If on the personal front, you’re hitting a hard wall of burnout, man, let’s talk.” And mine is just like yours, Dr.Richard.Low or Dr.Scott.Leune. On the practice side, where do you figure out, “Okay, I need a coach here”? What is that moment where you’re like, “I need someone to help me in my practice and I need to act on this now”?

Dr. Scott Leune:       

The tactical side of practice management. We always try to optimize that, whether we’re being burned out or not. I want my NBA player shooting the highest percentage he can. Whether we’re losing the game or winning a game, we need to be very good at scoring. We need to be good at playing the game, right?

So, very successful dentists also need tactical coaching, even if they’re not being burned out, so that it could become even more successful. Right before we recorded this, for example, I was on a call with a dentist. They got two locations. They do seven million in collections a year. They were very successful out of two locations. And we did two tiny, little tactical things that freed up more than $200,000 of profit per year. We had a call today, a half an hour call just to follow up to make sure it’s still holding, it still got implemented and it’s still delivering that result. These are not burned out dentists. They’re not compromising. These are dentists that needed an expert tactician, in a way, to help them see and do those little improvements that can make a big difference over time.

Now, the burned out dentists, they also need tactical help because so often the inefficiencies of their practice, the lack of profit, the just mundane tasks that have to be done sometimes that we could get rid of, just all kinds of friction happens in a dental practice. We need to have a tactical approach to get rid of those friction points. So, that’s practice management. Is there a better way to schedule? Can we reduce no-shows? Can we have a less stressful schedule but produce more per day? How do we address our fee structure? How do we address our payment options? What’s being said on the phone? What’s our case … All that kind of stuff.

That’s where dentists, especially owners, need to go to whether or not they’re in burnout. But if they’re in burnout, they need to run to that side, because so often their experience of burnout has one of those things as an ingredient. Now, I also believe heavily that if you’re feeling physical burnout or mental burnout or relationship burnout, you need to address those as well. While I am not that kind of a coach for dentists, I obviously talk to these dentists about those things all the time. But I know that when you are physically better, you are better in life. When you have better relationships, you’re better in life. That’s just a fact. You become a better practice manager if you’ve got a healthier relationship with your spouse and you are physically healthier.

So, I think the next step for someone listening to this saying, “I feel burned out,” if you’re a dentist in a dental practice, I think one ingredient has to be practice management coaching, but then we’re going to need some other reset probably in the other burned out areas of your life. If you could just be really honest with yourself for just a second and you can commit to having an action occur, then do you need a personal trainer? Yes or no? That’s a phone call. Do you need someone making your meals? Yes or no? That’s an online order. Do you need couples therapy? Yes or no? That’s an appointment you schedule. Do you need your own therapy? Just schedule it. That’s the next step, do. Do is the next step. Do. Not think, not worry, not wait, not analyze. Just be honest and just do. And I think that’s the next step.

Dr. Richard Low:    

I love it. I love it so much. And the difference in direction of capitalizing on one of these burnout moments, the difference in where you are in two years, in five years, if you’re able to use burnout as data of, “Something is not working, I need to make a change.” And sometimes that change might be drastic. If you can use burnout as data to get the right kind of help and make the changes that you’re avoiding making in your practice and in your personal life, that is an exponential return over the next 2, 3, 5, 7 years rather than imploding, destroying your life, burning out from dentistry, selling it, and trying something else. You create freedom and options for yourself and the ability to really prioritize the things that matter to you, and make great choices.

Dr. Scott Leune:       

Richard, what you just said is very genius. So, I’m going to restate it a little differently. You said, “Let’s use burnout to free us.” There’s something very freeing about saying, “I just can’t do it like this anymore.” We’ve been wanting to say it. We’ve been wanting to have the moment where we get to say, “I refuse to do dentistry in a schedule like this anymore. I refuse to be in a practice situation anymore that doesn’t make me any money. I refuse to be fat and unfit.” We’re waiting to have the freedom to say that and to take that step. Yet, irrationally, we just wait. We don’t actually do it.

So, what you said is when you’re feeling this pressure, this burnout, let that be your metric. Let that be your trigger to then step up to your life and say, “I can’t do it this way anymore. We’re changing.” That is a very beautiful thing to say.

Dr. Richard Low:    

You don’t need a metrics dashboard. You can just feel it.

Dr. Scott Leune:       

That’s right. I think that if someone’s saying, “I’m feeling burnout from my practice.” All right, good. Don’t get depressed about it. Be thankful that your life is telling you, “This chapter needs to end. We need to start a new chapter. We can’t keep doing it this way anymore.” Just listen to your happiness. Listen to your kind of burnout meter, right? And try to understand the things you just can’t do anymore.

And I still think you’re going to need a coach to help you start the next thing because life is distracting. Life has temptations, it has things that burden us, that feel like requirements. Life will pull us back to that situation of burnout if we don’t have the clarity and the initiative to walk away from it. So, I think a coach is going to give a lot of people that kind of path they need, that light in that maze of a tunnel, that hand reaching out to them to help carry some of the burden and lead them is needed with coaching.

Reframing Burnout as an Opportunity

Dr. Richard Low:    

That’s amazing. The cool part is two years down the road, five years down the road, you might look back and realize, “That moment, that burnout, that difficult situation is actually the gift that changed me to go in a completely different direction and allows me to help other people who are in that same moment.” You can then turn that junction point into the ability to help others as well. So, if you’ll pay attention to that data, it’s going to guide you. You can get the help, you can get the support, you can make the changes.

So, Scott, thank you for having this conversation. I think a lot of people are going to resonate and realize, “I need to make a change,” because of what we said today. So, thank you.

Dr. Scott Leune:

Yeah. And just one last thing, life, there’s no finish line. We’re supposed to love the journey. So, it’s about the journey. It’s about moving. It’s about growing and changing. There’s no end. And the only thing that’s true is that we have today. Yesterday’s gone and tomorrow it doesn’t exist yet. It’s just about loving the journey.

That doesn’t mean we go after short-term happiness. So much of loving the journey is knowing that we’re on this long-term, disciplined journey of good, right? Of significance. Our life is significant. So, when we feel this burnout, that’s us on the wrong journey. We got off course too far to where now it’s hurting. We need a new journey that we enjoy, that we know is significant. It’s going to be hard. Every journey is hard. It’s not about an easy journey. It’s about a journey that we can passionately say is the right journey.

Just another analogy of looking at it. Burnout is kind of like getting off of a path that makes sense and now we’re in the weeds, in the sticker burs. We’re feeling the pain. We’re trying to walk through that, and we’re justifying it. That’s not a right thing to do. We got to get on a new journey.

Dr. Richard Low:

I love it. Well, here’s to the new journeys. Thank you all for listening and being here. We’ll talk to you next time on The Shared Practices Podcast.