The Human in the Helper: It’s easier to prioritize our kids over ourselves

Jenny knows what it’s like to juggle many roles. At one point in the pandemic, she was running a small private practice, a second business of an online community, and working a full time job with a toddler at home. When her second child arrived, she was grateful for family to be present immediately after her son’s birth, an experience she didn’t get with her daughter who was born in September 2020. Jenny brought their son home, and days later noticed a rash developing on his tiny body but thought it was related to the 100 plus degree heat of Houston where they live. At her son’s check up, the doctor had concerns. “She calmly said, ‘you’re going to the emergency room now.’ I felt like I was in the dark as to what was going on but took him right away so they could run tests,” Jenny recalled. Her son was nine days old and remained in the hospital for three days as they waited for test results.

Jenny’s son had a staph infection. Although it was a relief to know the cause and receive treatment, Jenny found herself in self-blame. “Did I cause this to happen? Were there too many people around him at his birth? Should I have done something different?” Jenny isn’t alone in having these thoughts as a woman and mother. “I struggle to accept help. I tend to not rely on others and do things myself.” But as she stayed in the hospital with her son, relying on her spouse and others to keep things going at home was necessary.

A second opportunity to accept help from loved ones came when her son got a second staph infection at two months old while visiting family in Colorado. Jenny found herself telling clients about her son as she needed to cancel and reschedule appointments in order to address his needs. “It’s easier to prioritize our kids needs over our own,” Jenny reflected. She wants to operate from a ‘family comes first’ place but recognizes how that can feel challenging to herself and others when holding the role of primary earner in a household.

Figuring out our own needs as therapists and small business owners is a work in progress. Jenny had to learn how to slow down to meet her own needs. “Our bodies tell us when they’ve been ignored and neglected, and then we don’t have a choice in how to practice self-care.” As a mom, woman, and therapist who keeps others’ needs in mind, Jenny named the experience as “weaponized self-care, how are we supposed to do that?” She spoke to how it felt hypocritical to help clients and colleagues practice self-care when she wasn’t doing it well herself. Now she gives herself more grace and owns it when it happens. “I’m trying to model self-care but it’s not perfect,” she said.

Being a mom of two small children has also influenced her approach to self-care. “Our kids are purely living in the present, they model this for us. It’s also how we can recognize we aren’t taking care of ourselves in that present moment.” Jenny brings this insight into her online community for trauma therapists, who are working on their own journeys of balance and self-care. “We can join kids in the present moment, supporting healing and self-care through meaningful connection.”

Things happen to us as humans, even as we support our clients as professional helpers. Do you have a story you want to share the mental health community? Email us at croswaitecounselingpllc@gmail.com to learn more about the Human in the Helper Series!

The Human in the Helper: This isn’t something essential oils are going to fix.

Gabrielle shows up as vibrant, friendly, and personable, which serves her well as a mental health leader and Licensed Clinical Social Worker. She’s made quite the name for herself as an entrepreneur and consultant serving therapists and professionals around burnout and burnout prevention. With her passion, beautiful tattoos, and love of Zumba, it’s hard to believe she’s already experienced significant professional burnout in her career.

“I woke up one day and hated it,” Gabrielle shared. “My clients were no longer my ideal clients. I didn’t have the boundaries I needed. I kept hearing my own voice in my head say, ‘this is how it is.” But Gabrielle found out that things could be different. She was venting about how tired she was to a colleague in another industry one day. Their response? Sell your practice. 

“I found myself fantasizing about selling, but with the number we came up with, it didn’t seem worth the work.” At least at first. Gabrielle spoke to how she’d entered the mental health industry while working three jobs, and was subscribing to the hustle and grind culture of being a Millennial. “I believed that the harder I worked, the better it would be.” Which lead to burnout. Gabrielle recalls how she worked a job where she and her colleagues were expected to work long hours, take their work computers home, and come in on Saturdays or Sundays to get caught up.

Gabrielle then moved into private practice, rapidly growing into a group practice serving a community in need. She acknowledged that she built her business fast with the same drive of previous jobs and hadn’t worked on all of her own stuff as a person and professional. “This is what business ownership is about,” she told herself when she felt it catching up to her. Then she got the call to sell her business. “I had to ask myself, what do I want my life to look like?”

Gabrielle is a trailblazer in the mental health community by challenging the assumptions that success means a full private-pay practice or group practice ownership. “I have no regrets, this is alignment with my values,” she said of selling her practice. When asked what she wants other therapists to know, she shared, “you can create your dream life! There are so many options.” She warned against comparison to colleagues or listening to the ‘shoulds.’ She named how therapists have set high expectations for themselves, saying “we didn’t talk about the risks of burnout in school.”

When reflecting on her current roles of being a business and burnout consultant, Gabrielle shared a story of how an old job asked for self-care tools to be donated to their self-care room for employees. “This isn’t something essential oils are going to fix.” We have to agree.

To learn more about Gabrielle and how she can help colleagues and professional communities heal from burnout, visit her website at https://gabriellejulianovillani.com/

Things happen to us as humans, even as we support our clients as professional helpers. Do you have a story you want to share with the mental health community? Email us at croswaitecounselingpllc@gmail.com to learn more about The Human in the Helper Series!

Navigating Entrepreneurial Burnout

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Burnout is an experience that doesn’t discriminate. It can happen to anyone, which is why 75% of working Americans report they’ve experienced symptoms of burnout while in the workforce (MHA and FlexJobs, July 2020). It’s one aspect that pushes people into entrepreneurship, amidst a desire for control, pursuing passions, and an enticing vision of working for ourselves.

Yet what happens when we feel burnt out as an entrepreneur? When there’s no quitting a job to pursue our own goals and dreams? When setting our own schedule actually means working more than a 9-5? When the hustle and grind culture remains, this time labeled as entrepreneurial spirit because we feel compelled to think and dream about our business 24/7 to see it grow. Does this sound like you? I can definitely relate and so can my clients. I share that I’ve experienced professional burnout 1.5 times, and it’s a reason other professionals have begun exploring their entrepreneurial burnout in working with me.

Entrepreneurship is celebrated because of the possibilities it presents, but it’s also hard. Perhaps you recall the graph that claimed to depict the day-to-day life of an entrepreneur. It was an image full of ups and downs that went viral because of how relatable it was. From this interpretation, we can assume that for every success, there are long nights, high anxiety, fluctuating uncertainty, and gobs of self-doubt. Experience stress for too long and we find ourselves in entrepreneurial burnout.

So how do we keep a flow to work and life that prevents entrepreneurial burnout from happening? I like the word ‘flow’ because the word ‘balance’ implies equal parts work and homelife, which might not feel realistic. Instead, professionals are redefining expectations of work-life balance as work-life flow. For example, perhaps you are launching a new program or product for six weeks and live very much in work, followed by a scheduled break with time away to reconnect with family, thus re-entering the homelife space. Maybe you immerse yourself in entrepreneurial projects from 8am-12pm then attend to family needs the rest of the day. How would your work-life flow show?

Knowing that work-life flow is one piece of a complex puzzle, here are some other tools that can help you address burnout as an entrepreneur. Want the worksheets to make these tasks easier? Grab your free download of our 22 skills for busy professionals at Perfectioneur.com

1.     Craft your ideal schedule

Have you ever sat down to explore your ideal schedule? What would it be if you weren’t subjecting yourself to the hustle or grind culture of being your own boss? Would you have Fridays off? Be done for dinner each night? Take two weeks off at the holidays to visit family? By crafting your ideal schedule and seeing it on paper, it becomes more real. How does it compare to your current schedule? What’s one step you can take to be closer to your ideal schedule?

2.     Identify tasks to delegate or remove

This is a difficult ask for lots of entrepreneurs who self-identify as control freaks or disclose that their business is their baby. And yet freeing up our creative time by delegating tasks we don’t enjoy can make bigger change happen that much more quickly! Want to identify which tasks to delegate first? Grabbing our worksheet to walk through ranking daily and monthly tasks for enjoyment can be a great place to start!

3.     Revisit your Top Ten Priorities

That’s right, as a former workaholic, I’m a fan of having ten goals or priorities at a time! As you explore your current status within entrepreneurial burnout, where are you in your progress with your goals? Are you feeling far from achieving them, which could speak to the burnout itself? Are your goals forgotten or on the backburner, which is contributing to your feelings of being adrift or unfocused? Do you need to revise your top ten priorities to include health and wellness to recover from current burnout symptoms?

By no means are these the only strategies to fight entrepreneurial burnout. After all, burnout is complex for many in the workplace, whether they work for others or for themselves. I also want to honor the possibility that some entrepreneurs will read this and decide to work for someone else to regain the structure they crave and to experience a more clear separation of work and home. I see you. Of course that is an option. Regardless of what you decide to do in your own career journey, my hope is that we can continue to talk about the many strategies of burnout prevention and recovery so that we don’t lose people or their passions to a cultural norm of workaholism and exhaustion.