Recharge Your Business Passion - Episode 190

 If you're feeling exhausted, unmotivated, or just plain stuck in your business, this episode is for you. Burnout isn't just about working too much. It's about feeling disconnected from what you're working for.

Now, I've seen it happen time and time again. A business owner starts with a fire in their belly, passionate about what they're building. But somewhere along the way, that passion fades and work starts feeling like a grind instead of a mission.

You wake up every day and push forward, but instead of excitement, you feel like you're just checking boxes, putting out fires, and trying to keep up. So let's get real. If you're not excited about your business, how can your team, your clients, and your partners be excited? Today, we're not just talking about burnout.

We're talking about how to reignite your passion, reclaim your focus, and build a business you actually love again. This is the Budding Entrepreneur Podcast. 

Good day, and welcome to the Budding Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Randy Bridges. In each episode, we dive into practical business strategies that you can put to work in your business right away. We also focus on inspiring stories from leaders who are shaking and making things happen in their industry.

It's all about giving you the tools and insights to take you and your business to the next level. So get comfortable, and let's jump right in. 

Alright, alright. We are on episode 190 of the podcast. Today is Friday, March 14th, 2025. We're going to be tackling a challenge that every entrepreneur faces at some point.

Burnout. Let's be honest. Entrepreneurs, we're wired to push hard.

We thrive on challenges. But that constant drive can turn into frustration, exhaustion, and even resentment towards ourselves as well as the business we've built. And the worst part is that burnout doesn't always look like burnout.

It can show up as lack of motivation. It can feel like you're working harder but achieving less. And it can make you question if all this effort is even worth it.

So today we're diving into how to identify a burnout, why it happens, and what you can do to fix it and get back in love with your business. We're going to look at what burnout actually looks like. It's not always obvious.

Why passion fades and what really happens behind the scenes. How you can shift your perspective and reconnect with your why. And the practical ways to rebuild your energy and create a business you love once again.

We're kicking things off with our quote of the week from Simon Sinek. He said, Working hard for something we don't care about is called stress. Working hard for something we love is called passion.

That quote hits home, doesn't it? If you're an entrepreneur, you know what that feels like. The problem isn't working hard. Entrepreneurs, we don't mind putting in the hours.

It's a labor of love to us. The problem is when the work no longer excites you. Think about it.

When you first started, every challenge was exciting. Every win felt like a huge milestone. But over time, the weight of responsibility, decisions, and daily operations, well, that can just crush your excitement.

Passion isn't about avoiding hard work. It's about loving what you work hard for. So today, we're not talking about working less.

We're talking about how to get back to a place where working feels meaningful once again. Now let's consider why passion fades. This is the real cause of burnout.

Burnout happens because of too much disconnect with what makes us real. You know, I know this myself. Most business owners don't wake up one day and decide they're burned out.

It creeps in over time. And if you don't recognize the warning signs, it can drain your motivation, creativity, and enthusiasm for growth. And I have a story that I'm going to be sharing a little bit later on, talking about this very thing in my own life.

We'll be going back a few years, but I think you'll see the patterns that were going on and how things were happening. And I found myself, even back into high school, doing a lot of these same types of patterns. But anyway, moving back into why passion fades.

Here's what really happens at that point. You start with decision overload. You're making so many decisions every day that your brain is exhausted before noon.

We talked about this just a few weeks ago. Another area is in lack of progress. No matter how hard you work, it feels like you're stuck in the same place.

It seems so difficult to move out of the things that are keeping you stuck in the progress that you're getting. And when that happens, that's really going to break down your ability to move forward, even in the best of circumstances. Another area is disconnect from your vision.

You know, the business you once loved now feels like a job. And that's really unfortunate because you are the passion. You are the driving heartbeat of your business.

And if you're not in it, who else will be? Right? So your own vision has to be clear. You have to see not just your place in it. You have to see everybody's place in it, start to finish.

And finally, and this is very common, misaligned responsibilities. You find yourself spending more time doing things you don't enjoy instead of the work that fires you up, that gets your creativity happening, that makes you happy at the end of the day because of the success you've had in doing what you really love and want. Again, burnout doesn't just drain energy.

It crushes creativity and it crushes ambition. And if you let it go unchecked, you'll start resenting the very business you built. Now, given all that, let's start shifting your perspective from surviving to thriving.

And this is going to be very helpful, I think, to a lot of people. I know when I've gone into coaching and consulting in the past, this is one of the things that when you get away from that, man, I'm just, I'm just getting by. And you get into, man, the challenges that I have now are nothing compared to how they were before.

Yeah, you'll really appreciate this. So the first step to beating burnout isn't working less. It's really working differently.

You got to ask yourself, what part of my business do I truly enjoy? For me, it is the operations. I love that side of things. And it is the technology side.

And I love that too. But those things actually drag me away from the actual passion of my business. And for most entrepreneurs, burnout happens when they've drifted too far from the work they truly love.

Again, I appreciate and really enjoy operations. I'm great with customers in doing that, great in technology, great in strategy. But those things at the end of the day do not fill my cup with something that I can drink and enjoy.

And the biggest mistake that business owners often make, they get so caught up in running the business that they forget to lead it. Remember, you are the leader. You're the voice in the lone desert everyone else is following.

So if you don't know where you are, and you're telling everybody else behind you what to do, you go over here, and you go over there, and you do this, and you do that, and you're walking backwards, your vision is not in front of you. You cannot move forward. So let's flip that and talk about the things that make sense.

Now we've talked about this last week, but I want to reiterate. Leaders focus on vision and strategy. Operators focus on execution.

If you're caught in execution as a leader, it's time to shift back so you can lead appropriately. Instead of trying to fix everything yourself, it's time to put yourself back in the right role. And whether that's shifting you back or finding another person to implement a vision, the important part is to make a change.

To give you a good idea of how this process can help you and even hurt you, I'd like to bring forward a story. I'm going to kind of wing this completely. I haven't really planned on it, but I wanted to introduce it because I think that it is important to hear it in action.

Back when I was in high school, I was trying and struggling to figure out who I was and what I wanted to be. After a few years in high school, the end of my sophomore year, I said, I want to be a music teacher. Music is in my background.

I've been doing it since I was four years old. It shouldn't surprise anybody that that is something that I would want to do. And so for the remainder of high school, my whole focus was on music, learning, studying, testing, playing, everything about it.

And I put it as my number one goal. And I went to college and ended up going to a community college that didn't have a music program. I had to focus and restructure and put my time into my basic classes so that I could get together everything I needed to do to move to another college that actually had a music program.

And so I did all that, completed my freshman year, never losing sight of that goal, music teacher. And I started studying psychology and doing things, bringing in other different things. And I learned a lot about passion when I went to my second junior college.

It was Bakersfield Community College. And I played in the music program, enjoyed my time, always keeping music teacher as my north star. I ended up getting out of college and going into work and never lost that north start that I was heading for.

And I continued working and then I went back to college. And I went to college for a while and did some more work. And then I had to take a break from college and I needed one semester to get myself back in preparation to do it.

And everybody told me, you know, you'll never go back. You'll never go back to college. Well, time came and back to college I went.

And I continued working through it. I brought in now journalism and I brought in editing and photography and all kinds of other things that were great to keep me going. But my north star was still the same.

I left the community college and literally moved in with my aunt, gave no real advanced notice, showed up on the day to sign up for college at Fresno State in the music department, hadn't even told anybody I was going. I just went. I literally went.

Everything aligned for me. I got together just enough money to be able to pay for my tuition and my books. And the process kept going through.

But what happened was that I became very disillusioned with how being a music teacher was going to work out for me personally. And so, you know, I didn't feel I could actually give anybody the focus they needed in order to be the kind of music teacher I wanted to be. So I left music education.

And I had stayed in this all the way from the end of the 10th grade until my what is now senior year in college. That's a long time to keep a north star even though you're not focusing directly on it. When I had that epiphany and kind of went away from that, I decided that I wanted to go ahead and try some other things and see what's going on out there that would help me.

So I spent a lot of time with jobs and things like that that would advance my skill set, my knowledge. And I learned a lot about business on the side. I'd been doing business operations improvement since I was, oh yeah, a sophomore in high school.

So it wasn't a surprise for me. Years later, the light bulb went on. This is where I should be.

But at that point, I was already in the IT track and had been for many years. When you get that kind of a north star, it'll keep you progressing at a level you've never imagined before. You know, having this ability to stay focused and to stay passionate.

When you find it, you've got to embrace it. You've got to wrap yourself around it and to protect it because it's all too easy to lose track of it if you get off track on yourself and your own passions and things that are keeping you going. So I take the lesson from this story, if there is one, is that it's much easier to maintain your passion, to maintain your vision, to maintain your focus if you're not allowing other things to continually interrupt it, to continually sidestep it and cause it to go off the rails.

Many times, you will find that it's just way too easy. Like I said, protect that passion. Protect that vision that you have.

Own it. Make it part of you. And when you're done with your day, you can set it down knowing full well it's right where you left it.

If you have to do like I did and go away from a passion, keep it somewhere nearby if you can. I still continue to do music teaching every once in a while on a private basis. The lessons that I learned as the very beginning student are still applicable to people today.

So I hope this has been at least a roundabout way of understanding that life can throw you some curves and you've got to be prepared to deal with that. Thanks for letting me share my story. And getting back into the actual episode that we're dealing with, I want to look at three practical ways to reignite your passion.

Now, if you haven't figured it out yet, burnout doesn't go away on its own. It's important to take intentional steps to bring your energy back. Here's what worked for me and for some of my clients.

First, reconnect with your vision. Write down the WHY you started your business. What problem did you want to solve? Who did you want to solve it for? And what impact did you want to make for them? Two, delegate or automate anything that drains you.

If certain tasks make you dread work, find a way to delegate them or figure out how to eliminate them. One of the two. And number three, surround yourself with passionate people.

Burnout happens faster when you're isolated. Get around growth-minded entrepreneurs who can challenge and energize you. I'm part of the wealthy consultant, the whole ecosystem.

These are all people, mostly coaches, consultants, but there's a few other people. But the passion that these people bring every single day is infectious. And it's hard for us to not be positively affected by that passion of the people that are around us.

You can dislocate yourself, disassociate yourself, but why would you? This isn't Facebook. This isn't LinkedIn. We're not doing outreach like that.

This is people that are good for us. People that know us, like us, and want to see us succeed as much as we do, and how much we want to see them succeed. Ultimately, if your work drains you, something needs to change.

And the sooner you take action, the sooner you get your passion back. So let's do a quick recap here. Burnout happens when you lose connection with your business vision.

The biggest burnout triggers are decision overload, misaligned responsibilities, and lack of progress. And finally, reigniting passion starts with changing your perspective. Delegate what drains you, and reconnect with the why that you started with that business from day one.

Now next week, we're going to look at a topic on finding hidden opportunities in your business data. See, most business owners and entrepreneurs look at revenue and expenses, but they miss the key insights that drive real growth. So we're going to break down how to find hidden profit leaks, what key metrics tell you about your next big opportunity, and how simple data insights can help you scale faster.

Let's see you back here next week. You won't want to miss it. That's it for this episode.

I hope you picked up some valuable insights, and maybe even sparked a few new ideas. If you want to keep the conversation going, or maybe even explore partnerships, don't hesitate to reach out. And hey, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this with someone who needs to hear it.

The steps you take today could be the start of something big tomorrow. For the budding entrepreneur, I wish you the best in your health, your wealth, your business, your family, everything about you. Take care, and we'll see you back here next week.