Simple Burnout Resets You Can Use Today

Blake Schofield (00:03.598)
Real leadership. Real life. Real impact. No more choosing between your career and your life. Here you’ll find honest conversations, science-backed strategies, and inspiring stories to help you thrive at work and truly enjoy your life outside of it.

I’m your host, Blake, and I’m honored to help you create more impact with ease.

Last week, I spent half a day working with an organization in Minneapolis with a group of their leaders, and what an honor it was. What I saw inside that virtual room was honestly the exact same challenges I’ve been helping individual leaders navigate for nearly nine years.

This is an organization that’s gone through a tremendous amount of change. Some of that change, a lot of it, was macroeconomic and completely outside of their control. Some of it was growth-related, and others was internal evolution and what happens when the business keeps shifting but the systems or ways of working don’t.

In this organization, the HR team recognized that the things they’d done before to support their people weren’t really working anymore. They’d brought in traditional wellness speakers, done mental health sessions, and had offered resilience and burnout training. But their leaders were so busy, so back-to-back, and so overloaded that many of them either couldn’t attend or felt like those things weren’t actually solving the real problem they were living day to day.

And honestly, this is something I see all of the time. A top-down approach to what’s happening with burnout or struggles that leaders are having inside organizations generally doesn’t work. We need both a top-down and a bottom-up approach.

There’s this belief that burnout can be solved with a few simple tools or tactics. But burnout, fulfillment, performance, leadership growth, culture, career pathing, employee engagement—all of these things are deeply interconnected. And when we try to solve burnout in isolation without understanding the root causes underneath it, we end up applying band-aids to something that’s structural and much deeper.

One of the biggest awareness moments in the workshop was this: most leaders don’t recognize burnout when it begins. They recognize it when it reaches a peak—when they can’t keep up anymore, when their health starts to suffer, when it spills into their home life, and their mental and emotional capacity shrinks. What they often don’t realize is that they’ve been living in chronic states of burnout long before that peak moment ever arrived. They’ve been functioning, delivering, and performing—but doing so while depleted.

Burnout is really a chronic state of misalignment across three areas.

The first is being misaligned with how you’re naturally wired to thrive. When you’re in misalignment, you’re two to three times less productive, you experience more stress, and less fulfillment. One of the participants asked me a great question: how do we actually know how we’re wired to thrive? Is there an assessment? Is there a test?

While I do use assessments in my work, what I’ve found is that this goes much deeper than any one test result. It’s really about uncovering your Unique Fingerprint for Success™—the natural pattern behind every success you’ve ever created. That’s not company-dependent, role-dependent, or even work-dependent.

It’s easy to want a quick personality test to tell you who you are and what to do. But think about it—how many tests have you taken? And did that alone shift things for you? For most people, the answer is no.

So here’s a simpler starting point.

Ask yourself: What percentage of my day am I in flow?

Meaning I’m fully engaged, time passes without me noticing, I feel energized by the work I’m doing, and I have more energy after I finish. If that number is low, that’s a strong indicator of misalignment.

The second area is beliefs and conditioning. Most of our subconscious beliefs were formed by the time we were seven years old, and they drive 90 to 95% of our decision-making. Things like perfectionism, second-guessing, not wanting to burden others, or feeling like you should already know the answer.

These aren’t just thoughts—they shape how you lead, communicate, and how much pressure you carry every day. The good news is you can change your beliefs, just like updating software.

The third area is environment. Many people think the problem is their company, boss, or industry. But often, misalignment in environment goes deeper—we don’t even realize what we need to operate at our best.

For example, I do my best work in deep strategic sessions. I might spend four to eight hours fully immersed, and in that time I can get months of work done. But that requires space. If my day is fragmented or highly distracting, my productivity drops significantly.

These things might seem small, but they shape your productivity, fulfillment, and performance.

Another important piece is mental capacity. Under higher stress, we lose about 30% of our thinking capacity. That impacts problem-solving, decision-making, focus, and creativity.

So when leaders say they feel slower or overwhelmed, it’s not in their head—it’s physiological. And if you’re delivering results at only 70% capacity, imagine what’s possible at full alignment.

So today, I want to offer two simple tools. These are not the root solution—they’re stabilizers.

First: create two 15-minute breaks in your day. Even if your calendar is packed, shorten meetings or group things together. During these breaks, don’t use technology. Move, change location, reset your nervous system.

Second: box breathing. Inhale for four seconds, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four. Repeat four to five times. This helps your body relax and your brain refocus.

Normalize this with your team. Model it. Because sustainable success comes from working in alignment—not pushing through exhaustion.

The world isn’t slowing down. Change is accelerating. The leaders who thrive are those who learn how to work in alignment with how they’re wired—not against it.

So take these small shifts and start creating space. Because awareness plus small action creates momentum.

As always, thank you for joining me. If this helped you, share it with someone who needs it.

Lead with intention and create your Impact with Ease™.

Most successful people don’t realize they’re in burnout because stress and exhaustion have become so normalized. But burnout is actually a sign of deeper misalignment between how you’re wired to thrive and how you’re working and living. Fix the misalignment and everything changes.

Take the free quiz at ImpactWithEase.com/burnout-type to discover your burnout type and get next steps to reclaim your energy, lead with confidence, and create more ease in your life and career.