001 - Welcome! Here's My Burnout Story

Summary

Welcome to The Burned Out to Badass Podcast! In today's podcast, I'll be telling a little bit about me, my story and experience with burnout, what I'm doing now, and what you can expect from this podcast.

For show notes, head to coachellyn.com/podcast OR follow me on Instagram @coachellyn!

ACTION STEPS:

RESOURCES IN THIS EPISODE:

• My Take Back Your Life PREMIUM Membership - here

Transcript for this episode:

Ellyn: (00:09)

Hey there, my friend, and welcome to the Burned Out to Badass podcast. My name is Ellyn Schinke (@coachellyn on Instagram) and this is my monthly podcast where I am committed to giving you short, no BS episodes to help you, the busy burnout, professional and entrepreneur, find your balance and take back your life from burnout. Let's do this.

(00:34)

Hello there, my friend, and welcome to the first episode of the burned out to badass podcast. And I'm going to tell you right now, I'm not new to podcasting. I've been podcasting actually since, oh God, August, 2018. And I'd like to think I've kind of figured my out, but honestly, who knows, um, by what I have figured out is my business and the people I serve has dramatically changed since I started that first podcast. My previous podcast had gone through a lot of iterations, but ultimately it was very focused around personal growth.

Ellyn: (01:05)

If it's something you're curious about, checking out, it was previously called the take back your life podcast, but I suddenly had the urge to really narrow my focus, really start to very intentionally serve you that busy burned out corporate professional or entrepreneur because those struggles that you are dealing with on a day-to-day basis are the struggles that I am dealing with on a day-to-day basis. And they're the struggles that ultimately led me to going into burnout and stress management coaching. But actually before I dive into story time, because I totally will just dive in, I want to kind of tell you what we're going to be chatting about today. Firstly, I want to welcome you to this podcast kind of already done that, but welcome again. I'm so happy you're here. I've and I also wanted to share a little bit with you about not only why I created this podcast for ultimately my burnout story, my experience with burnout that led me here that led me to doing this work. Um, so I've been coaching actually since 2014, I got into it

Ellyn: (02:01)

Be a health and fitness coaching kind of jumped around a bit to like personal growth coaching, um, clarity coaching. I did a lot of, uh, productivity and time management for a while. And then I ultimately had kind of this aha in 2019 and I came to the realization, oh my God, everything I coach comes together under the realm of burnout. And the really ironic thing is prior to even thinking about burnout and stress and coaching that I had been identifying myself and one of the biggest pivots and shifts in my life as a situation where I was dealing with burnout, I actually was in graduate school. When I first found coaching, I was in graduate school, getting my PhD in a very fancy schmancy, sounding science. We're just going to leave it at that. I was getting a PhD in, um, a biology related field and I had this insane experience with burnout. Every facet of burnout you can think of, I was experiencing and there are actually, there are four main types of burnout that I see in working with my clients. And I swear to God, I was experiencing three of those four types. I was overwhelmed. I was physically burned out. Like I was that exhaustion that we all associate with burnout and I was emotionally exhausted.

Ellyn: (03:18)

So when I went into science, this is like basically the only career path I'd ever seen myself on. You know, when I was in high school, I knew I was going to be a science major. I knew I was going to be, I knew I was going to be a researcher. I was going to do this work. And it's really, really rough when you wrap up your identity in your career and that's kind of how I'd gotten. I was very much somebody who very much identified with the science major. I was a science major. That was how I identified and labeled myself and you all of the, you know, impressiveness, isn't a word. There was a lot of telling people that I was a science major that just made me feel very important. And I wrapped a lot of my identity up in that. So when I finished school, that was the trajectory trajectory I landed on was I did science.

Ellyn: (04:05)

I was a researcher. I got a job out of college as a researcher. And I ultimately went on to pursue this PhD as a researcher. And I don't think I was prepared for the roadblocks that I ran up against. I don't think I was prepared for the hurdles that I faced and suddenly things weren't coming easy anymore and suddenly I wasn't enjoying it anymore. And suddenly I saw all these people around me who had careers that I didn't want. I didn't see myself in. And it had a pretty massive impact on me. You know, that really kind of starts to get into the emotional side. You know, one of the most common signs of burnout, especially emotional burnout is feelings of apathy or disinterest, especially if you're somebody who's not usually that way. I'm a very, very enthusiastic person. If you're, if you are not, you don't know me.

Ellyn: (05:06)

You're not familiar with me head on over to my Instagram at coach Ellen, E L L Y N. I'm a very, very energetic and enthusiastic person. And you know, I do definitely have the ability to muster enthusiasm. I can muster enthusiasm for just about anything, which sounds like a super power, but honestly, it's not because I can convince myself that I really enjoy things that I don't, and I have this ability to find enthusiasm and just create it. And yet I started hitting this wall in graduate school where suddenly I just could not engage myself showing up to work and getting my out of bed in the morning was so, so hard. And I'm not meaning like the, oh, I just want to snooze my alarm and sleep more because my bed's comfortable. Like there was just this level of a lack of motivation behind it.

Ellyn: (05:54)

Like I did not want to show up for my life and that's, you know, that's oftentimes why symptoms of burnout get confused for depression is because that is also a sign of depression. Um, and that's very much what I was feeling and not only that, but I got very disconnected as though I was dealing with all of this. I got very disconnected from my friends and all the people that I'd spent my entire graduate career socializing with. I just, I, I couldn't bring myself to engage with them because I didn't want them to see me like that. Um, I didn't know how to connect with them because they were all in my graduate program as well. So there was like this massive emotional component to it. That was just so uncharacteristic of me, you know, some of the other things were, you know, graduate school demands.

Ellyn: (06:38)

A lot of you, you know, there was kind of this unspoken expectation of you work late and you work weekends and you were at the Beck and call of your experiments. And I said that at one point in time and a Facebook post when I was in graduate school, um, about how I kind of felt like I was expected to have no life. And I got some backlash for it, people in my department, but that's how I felt that was. And that's frankly how a lot of the students in my program felt was that we didn't have the ability or the, you know, we weren't empowered to have lives outside of science. And it was draining. It was exhausting to feel like I had to be on all the time to feel like I couldn't step away and to feel like that I was kind of being judged for the ways in which I was stepping away.

Ellyn: (07:23)

As I mentioned, I found coaching when I was in graduate school. Um, and coaching was this wonderful reprieve from everything that was draining me about graduate school. So I was, I was drained. I was exhausted. I was overwhelmed. And all I could think about was this kind of glorified picture in my head of quitting everything. And just being a coach, just quitting everything and stepping away. And that whole notion of you're planning and escape or getaway, and it could be a literal one. It could be a vacation, or it could just literally be like, I want to quit life. Like I want to quit all the aspects of my life and just go hole up on a remote island somewhere and do nothing. That's a symptom of overwhelm. And that's where I was at. Um, you know, so there was physical components, there were emotional components, there were overwhelmed components. All of the signs I was, I was numbing a lot. I'm a big fan of Bernie brown and Bernay brown talks about numbing and are numbing patterns. And I was numbing. I was distracting myself and just trying to completely disengage with things like alcohol and food and TV and movies. That was just my life for those couple years where I was really burned out ultimately

Ellyn: (08:39)

After about a year and a half, two years of really intense burnout, it was pad. It was so bad. I can't even tell you. Um, but after like two years, I finally was just like, this, this is not the path that I be on. Like, there's no way in hell. This is the path that I should be on and what I should be experiencing day to day. And I chose to quit my PhD. I left with my master's degree. Um, and so that experience really, really colored my pursuit of coaching and my decision to start looking into that. Because during that time I was working with coaches, I was really digging into myself and my personal growth. I was learning, you know, what are my triggers? What are my stressors? I was learning all of these really, really important things that I'm going to be teaching you in this podcast.

Ellyn: (09:25)

And that did ultimately lead me to dramatically change my life. My old podcast, as I mentioned, was called take back your life. And the reason why it was called that, and that's going to kind of come up a little bit in this podcast. Hell I might very well accidentally slip. And just call this the take back your life podcast at some point in an episode. But the reason why it was called that is because so much of what I was doing was taking back my life. It was taking back my power. It was taking back my, you know, the things that I doing for others, I all of that back. And I just said, you know what? I'm going to live for myself. I'm going to stop being a people pleaser. I'm going to stop being a perfectionist. And I'm going to take back my life from all of these really, really bad habits and personality traits that had really colored who I was and how I showed up in the world.

Ellyn: (10:15)

And when I chose to leave my PhD in this was in fall 2016. I did all sorts of crazy after I did that. I freaked my family out. Uh, you know, not only just in the whole I'm quitting graduate school thing, I freaked to the mountain in that, but I also freaked them out when I was just like, Hey guys, I'm going to travel the world for a year. And I ultimately left. And I took off and I did this program called remote year where we traveled, um, in a community about 40 to 50 people for 12 months. I was with these people for 12 months. I did not set foot inside of the United States in 2018. And that was the year where I started really, really building and experimenting with my coaching business. You know, it would take me another year, year and a half to find burnout, but that was a intense period of growth for me.

Ellyn: (11:01)

I actually wrote, um, a blog post during that time called concentrated human experience. And that's what I felt like that was. And then during that time, there were all sorts of other types of burnout and other ways of people pleasing that I had to fight against, you know, did I want to be the traveler who, you know, never took a break who was just so go, go, go. And I got to see the next thing. And I got an Instagram, this, that I was never present and I was never living and enjoying and just being in that moment. And I decided I didn't, I, I learned a lot about myself over the course of these couple of years, and that's really what I'm bringing to the table here since then. Um, I have very much niche down into burnout and stress management coaching. Um, I am very much niche down into serving basically me, um, my former self and really my current self and a lot of the things I still deal with.

Ellyn: (11:56)

I really focus on serving yes, busy, burned out corporate professionals and entrepreneurs, but I also really focus on serving that high achiever. For those of you that are familiar with the Enneagram, the Enneagram has this type type three, which is the high achiever and achievers. They basically define their worthiness and their enoughness in this world by the contribution they're making by the impact they're having, by how people see them and the validation they receive. And that is very much me. And it's very much a lot of the clients that I serve. And that's the person that I'm going to be speaking to in this podcast? Yes. The burnout corporate professional. Yes. The burnout entrepreneur, because those are both, you know, uh, situations and, um, career paths and whatnot that I can resonate with and relate to, you know, academia. And I spent 10 years in academia when I was doing science and research is basically a big corporation.

Ellyn: (12:59)

Universities are basically a big corporation. And now even outside that I do still have a day job and I am a manager inside of a corporation. So I get the manager life. I get the corporate life, I get that corporate hustle and sometimes how our institutions and corporations fall flat and really suck at helping us with our burnout. You know, they have these bandaid solutions where they bring in this speaker for an hour and kind of say, Hey, cool. We know you're burned out here. Here's, here's this person to come talk to you for an hour to show that we care. Um, I know that our corporations sometimes fall flat. And so I get that. I get that side, that desire to an impulse to show up because you want to make sure you're seen, and you're recognized I get that. I also get, because I have a business, you know, I'm building actively building my burnout coaching business.

Ellyn: (13:50)

And actually earlier this year, this past spring, I got into burnout speaking kind of accidentally because I started fielding inquiries for speaking on my website. So I got into that as well. So I'm building this business and I've been building this business. So I get the, I always have to be on mentality that a lot of entrepreneurs particularly solopreneurs have. So that's really why I'm here. That's really who I am showing up to serve. And what you can expect in these episodes is that I'm going to be giving you no. And I really committed to this no thing, because we all know that we should sleep more. Like we all know that to, you know, bounce back from being low energy, we should sleep more and take care of ourselves. We know that like that is the cookie cutter. I roll worthy burnout advice.

Ellyn: (14:39)

And that is not what I'm going to bring to you in this podcast. What I am going to bring to you in this podcast is new perspectives, new mindsets. I'm going to give you very, very tangible implementable tips. That is the commitment I am making to you in this. And because this is such a dramatic shift from the old podcast that I had. That's why I'm starting this new podcast. So I'm here, I'm pumped, I'm ready for it. And I am so excited to help you go from the burned out busy. I have no life and no balance person to the bad-ass you deserve to be. That's why I'm here. That's the commitment I'm making. And I am so freaking pumped. You're here with me. I am so freaking pumped. You're going to go on this journey with me and I cannot wait for us to get started. So that's a little bit about me. That's a little bit about what you can expect. I know I had that little trailer that kind of gives you a glimpse, but I wanted to give you a little bit more. So with that, thank you so much for being here with me. I'm going to put some, the content out really, really quickly after this, some repurposed podcasts

Ellyn: (15:43)

From my old podcast. Um, and I hope you really, really enjoy them. So with that, thank you so much for being here. If you want more right now, if you want some more daily burnout tips and daily content head on over to Instagram and follow me. I’m @coachellyn. That is E L L Y N. And I cannot wait to meet you. Thank you so much, my friend, and have a great rest of your day.