Need burnout secrets to keep you cleaning? Are you ready to throw in the towel and find a new career? WAIT! These 3 burnout secrets are proven to keep you going when you’re bored, tired, and sick of cleaning.
Listen: Burnout Secrets for House Cleaners
Watch: Burnout Secrets for House Cleaners
Hey there, I’m Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. You can find this and 400 other answered questions in this series on our YouTube channel.
What are My Burnout Secrets?
I’m asked all the time about my burnout secrets. People want to know how do you run 29 marathons and not burn out? How do you run a 30-year cleaning career and not burn out? How do you do 1,000 YouTube videos and not burnout?
Okay, so first, lots of house cleaners get in this mindset where, “Oh, I’m working so hard. I’m so tired. Oh, I’m so exhausted.” And then they go into burnout mode. The very first thing that I want to go back to is to bring you back to the moment that burnout starts first in your mind. It’s a trigger of a series of things where you say this is repetition and I’m burning myself out because I’m doing so much of the same things.
And you do it over and over and over and over again. And it becomes overwhelming that there is no new, exciting change to what you’re doing. Now, the good news is housecleaning is really boring. It’s super boring because it is routine.
You Can Get Easily Burnt Out in House Cleaning
So you do it over and over and over and over again. And then you do more of it, right? You can only clean a toilet in so many different ways. And after you’ve cleaned 19, 20 toilets in a day, you can get easily burned out on cleaning out toilets.
Then you do that every day, every year for a 30-year career. And what is so exciting about cleaning toilets? Well, the answer is, absolutely nothing. Boom.
All right. So how do you avoid burnout? Well, burnout because starts in the mind and also ends in the mind. And so for example, every time that I start to hit burnout because I have had burnout many times along the way. It’s part of nature, it’s part of an organic growth process.
There are Signs That Burnout is Coming
And so as I start to hit burnout, there are signs along the way. “Oh, wait a second. I’m starting to hit burnout mode.” And I focus a little bit differently on a different area of my business. Not get out of the business, not take on another business, but focus on a different area of the business. Because that allows me then to learn other skills that I can apply to the thing that’s causing the burnout, right?
So what I like to do is focus on accounting for example, where I can do a deep dive into, “Am I getting the most from the money that I’m earning? Is there a different way I could save? Are there IRAs that I could invest in? Are there other places I could invest my money? Is there a better piece of software I could be using to track my purchases? Is there a better-invoicing program or a better system I could use or a piece of software that would help me with my customers?
Are there other applications on the market like Square or PayPal or Stripe that might be advantageous to me that is more universally accepted by a customer? Are there different ways I can change my accounting process inside my business?”
Focus Your Mind on Something New and Exciting
And so while I’m cleaning and while I’m doing the routine tasks, my mind is focused on something new. All-day I’m focused on something new and exciting because it’s something I’m focusing on that’s different from the everyday norm for me.
And what that does is that tells my body, “Hey, wait a minute. Something new and exciting is happening.” And so I can go through the same routine tasks every single day without missing a day of cleaning or without missing a day of YouTube or whatever the thing is that I’m doing.
Because you’re focused on a slightly different area, but that area then supports the bigger picture of your business.
Start Recognizing Your Burnout Mode Signs
And so every time you start to hit burnout mode, start recognizing the signs and saying, “Wait for a second, I’m starting to slow down here a little bit. I’m starting to get burned out, I’m starting to not like my job. How can I re-energize what I’m doing?”
The secret is not to look at the long-term plan, because everything we do has a long-term plan, right? A marathon is 26.2 miles. It’s a long race. And you can’t think of it in terms of 26.2 miles.
You have to think of it in terms of where am I right now? I can always quit, but can I go a little bit further? And I say that also in my business. I can always quit the business, but can I go a couple more days? Can I go another week? Can I go another month? And I always push it out just a little bit.
Keep Going One Foot In Front of the Other
In a marathon, it’s one foot in front of the other. Don’t look up ahead. Just look at the road in front of you, right there in front of you is not so far. If you look way down there and you see a building way down there, and that’s the finish line, you’re going to tweak your head out and you’re going to go, “Wow, that’s so far away. The building is only this tall.” Right?
And so if you just look at the road in front of you and you focus on what you see and you keep things energized and exciting by learning new things, it will erase the edges of the burnout and it will help you slide through that weird icky process until you’re back on track and your business is sailing full force.
Resources
High-Octane Women: How Superachievers Can Avoid Burnout – https://amzn.to/3j8gp3q
The Art of Doing Nothing: The No-Guilt Practical Burnout Recovery System for Busy Professionals – https://amzn.to/39zI3Dl
Saying No Nicely: How to Set Boundaries and Avoid Burnout Without Feeling Guilty – https://amzn.to/3am3xTF
Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength, and Happiness – https://amzn.to/3atcESC
Move Think Smile: Burnout to BadAss – https://amzn.to/3rfftgP
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