← The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 807 | How to Make Your Life Burnout-Proof: Burnout 20 Years Later, Part 2
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The Art of Leadership Network. Blank space in your calendar is a trap. It looks like freedom, but it's jail disguised as liberty. Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast. I'm so glad you joined us. I hope our time together today helps you thrive in life and leadership. Actually, you know, I say that all the time. That is a mantra I embraced about 20 years ago. Why? Because 20 years ago this month, I burned out. And it was the deepest, darkest period in my life is actually part two of my little mini burnout series. So in the Last episode, episode 806, I talked about how I got burned out, what happened, and some of the symptoms of burnout. So if you haven't listened to that one, you can go back and listen to it. But today in this episode, I want to focus on how to recover from burnout because, thank God, it's been two decades and I have not burned out. I rebuilt my life from scratch with all new rhythms, all new patterns, and have had the real privilege of being able to help leaders around the world figure out how to get out and stay out of burnout. So this is part two. If what I'm sharing with you in this episode resonates with you, here's what I'd love to do. I wrote a book about this. It's called at yout Best, and I'm giving away a free copy to 20 listeners. So to enter the giveaway, here's what you can do. Visit carynwhoff.com giveaway by June 7th. Just click the link in the bio to get you there really quick. It's Carrie newhoff.com giveaway love to give away 20 copies of my book at your best. So just go to carynwhoff.com giveaway welcome to all of you who are watching, listening for the first time. You know what I love about this show and I run into this all the time when I'm on the road. So many of you are younger leaders. You are me or younger when I burned out. And if I can save you, if I can give you the cheat code, if I can save you from so much of the casualties of leadership, I'm going to be so much happier. So I want to do a brief recap of part one where I talked about me being almost roadkill in ministry in 2006, 20 years ago. And in that episode I talked about how burnout happens, what you can learn from it. So today we're going to go deeper into how to recover from burnout and prevent it. And if you've never Burned out. I don't believe you have to. So let's do a quick recap of the last episode just in case, you know, it's been a couple of days or you haven't listened to them back to back. It was 20 years ago this month that I was almost ministry roadkill. I had 11 years in ministry as a senior pastor. At that point, it was 11 years of 30% plus annual compound growth. And that was really difficult. It was wonderful. It was exhilarating. It was thrilling. And in the end, it almost took me out. I denied that I was going to burn out, but I didn't have a good formula for growth. My formula was more people equals more hours, and that doesn't scale. And I was exhausted and my marriage was hanging on by a thread. And what I learned, and I unpacked this in the previous episode, is that I was being rewarded for my dysfunction. That the more dysfunctional I got, the more the church seemed to grow. And I couldn't understand that. It's like it's not going well at home. I don't feel good inside. I'm probably never going to burn out because I'm stronger than that. But, like, the church kept growing. So I just kept doing what was a bad and unsustainable formula. So again, that's in the last episode. Things were not good on the inside and not good at home. But I could perform. And workaholism buried my pain. It got me a raise. It got me a promotion. So I was confused. Why would God bless me? In ministry, things have to be okay. But then in May 2006, I fell off a cliff. I explain exactly how that happened. By August, it got so dark, I had suicidal ideation. Had a few flickers of light come in September of that year. So we're four or five months into burnout. I begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And muscle memory got me through to December. But that season became a hinge point in my life. I look at my life now, 20 years later, as pre burnout and post burnout, and people even today talk about the old Carrie and the new Carrie. I actually redid a psychological profile with a counselor I've been working with. And the good news is the trajectory continues. He did a deep analysis of me. Apparently, I'm healthier even than I was five years ago. So I'm really grateful for this. And this is why I'm sharing it. I want this for you. I want this for you because I don't want you to have to go through what I went through and what so many leaders go through. So, quick recap of the five lessons we covered last time. Number one, dysfunction gets rewarded in the church. You can keep performing and your church might keep growing, but here's what I believe now. If you're winning at work, but if you're losing at home, you're losing. Second thing I learned, denial is an accelerator. I went through the symptoms of burnout last time. Not going to go through those again. But if you're denying it going, am I really in burnout? I don't think so. It is much easier for you just to say, you know what? I think I'm burning out. I'm going to get some help and I'm going to go deep on this one. That's good. Don't keep denying. If you're burning out, don't keep denying. Because denial is an accelerator. It's just going to get you to burn out faster. Third lesson was it's easier to find relief from the pace than the weight. Leadership can be heavy, and yes, Jesus will lift some of that, but the weight is always going to be with you. So what you need to do is find a sustainable pace. You can control your pace. You have to learn how to carry your weight. I went through some ideas on how you can do that. Fourth thing we covered is that ministry is a series of ungrieved losses. They just stack up, people leaving your church, friendships that dissolve, things that don't quite work out. And for me, they all came out at once in the month of August 2006. You want to grieve your losses in real time. And then finally, by way of recap, if God wants to go deep, it's because he wants to take you far. It took me a full three to five years to recover from the depth of the burnout. What I'm grateful for now is I know that I was building a much more solid foundation, and two decades later, I haven't burned out. So if you're in a tough season right now, don't try to cut it short. Go deep. Go to the root. Get the help you need. You'll come up a healthier you. So today I want to switch focuses and I want to focus on recovery and prevention. Really the question how do you get out and stay out of burnout? So once again, I'm not a psychologist. I shared that with you in the last episode. I have logged some miles in this field, though, and I am sharing out of my experience and I want to reflect on how to make your life burnout proof, or at least as burnout proof, as far as it depends on you. So far, this has worked for 20 years. So first principle is, you don't need to get back to normal. You need a new normal. What I realized when I was burned out is I was so desperate. There was a counseling session I went to in the summer of 2006, and it was around the time where I was starting to find myself suicidal, which I talked about in the last episode. And I said to my counselor, what is going on? And I'll never forget. He said to me, carrie, you're going to get through this. He said, but I want you to remember this, because there's a lot of people who live in a very dark place, and you'll be able to help them when you get through this. He had done what he called deconstruction therapy. And I'm like, can we please get to the reconstruction therapy now? Because I feel terrible. I'm totally burned out. I'm flat. I'm dead inside. And. And what took place. And I went through him and a couple of other counselors, and I read books and I listened to podcasts, and I thought, okay, if I go back to normal quickly, because that's all you want when you hurt. Normal got me burned out. Normal. It took 40 years. I got burned out. Maybe it's going to be six months till I burn out. Maybe a year, maybe five years. I did not want to do that. And I realized that the foundation on which the House of Me that had been built was built on was faulty, that there were beliefs and attitudes. I was a performance addict. I thought that my identity was somehow tied to growth. The more we grew, the better I was as a person. And so I really did the soul work. And then I listened to a lot of podcasts. Podcasts were coming out at the time, read a lot of books, and tried to figure out, how do I get a sustainable pace? And so what I worked on, literally for three to five years was finding a new normal. What would that look like? And that's that tagline that I say at the beginning of every episode, Live in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow. And I realized that the way I was living was not a sustainable pace. The way I was handling problems and developing leaders was not sustainable. So this new normal, living away today. And that means. So when I did this podcast, I got. We were out late with friends last night. Don't normally do that, but you can have exceptions to your rule. Slept in A little bit later today. I like to get up before 6. I slept until almost 7 because I knew I was going to be delivering these podcasts and I wanted to be fresh for you. Means I'm going to not go out tonight. I'm going to get some proper sleep. It means I do everything from scheduling my flights so that they're not red eyes, to making sure that I get some exercise three, four, five times a week, to making sure that I'm eating properly to make sure that I've got to close the laptop routine, as Cal Newport says, so that I'm not a workaholic, so that my workload is manageable. And what's really strange about this new normal is and I'm Sheridan at yout Best. So if you haven't seen my book at yout Best, you can pick up a copy or again, fill out the form@carrienewhoff.com giveaway. We're giving away 20 copies of it, but it's available on Amazon, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever you get your books. I outline the whole system to get healthy, but it boils down to today. I really can't cheat. And if I have a night like last night where we were out with friends in the middle of the week, I've got to recover. I got to live in a way today that will help me thrive tomorrow. That has worked for 20 years and it can work for you. So that's the first principle in recovery is you got to find a new normal. Because if normal got you broken and sick and burned out, you can't go back to normal or you're just going to do it again. So you got to find a new normal. Got the whole system inside the book at your best. Second thing is time off won't heal you when the problem is how you spend your time on I talk to leaders all the time who are like, well, I know, Carrie, it's a really busy season right now, but, you know, I just got to get to vacation. I just got to get to the summer. It's May now. I got to get to July. I'm going to have July off and have some time off. That's going to be amazing. Or leaders take sabbaticals. And I've talked to leaders who've taken six months sabbaticals and you know what? It did not solve their problem. Now, I'm a big fan of vacations. I've never taken a sabbatical. I probably will at some point, but why do I argue that vacations and sabbaticals don't work. I'll tell you why. You already know. You've taken, let's say, an amazing two week vacation with your family. You come back, you're totally restored, you're ready to go, you got gas in the tank. You cannot wait to get back in the pulpit on Sunday. But you got five days to get there before Sunday. So you show up on a Monday morning and by 11am all of your vacation is erased. There is so much inbound. All the email you missed, all the problems you have to solve, all the issues and suddenly you're running at 100 miles an hour and basically all of your vacation's been erased. By 11am before lunch, you feel as bad as you did before you went on vacation. So what's going on there? Time off didn't heal you because it can't. And you can't be taking time off every few months. That's why sabbaticals often don't work. You know, you take six months off, you go to this amazing place, you're so restored, and the first week back erased, you're just exhausted. The problem is not your vacation, it's your vocation. It's the pace you work at. Week to week, 48, 52 weeks a year. You're going too fast, you're going too hard, you're an unsustainable pace. Time off won't heal you because the problem is how you spend your time on. So the cure for an unsustainable pace is, guess what, A sustainable pace. I'm going to show you how to do that. And again, I say a lot more about this than at yout Best. But I want to give you the highlights. First thing you need to do, because you get three assets every day. You get time, energy and priorities. So the first thing you should do is stop saying you don't have the time. I made this change when I was figuring out my new normal because I always used to say when I was in my 30s, before I burned out, church was growing at compound rates of 30% plus a year for 11 years. People would say, hey, do you have the time? It's like, I don't have the time for that. I don't have the time to meet with you. I don't have the time to do this. I don't have the time to get the project done. My sermon isn't done because I didn't have the time. And I realized in my recovery, I'm like, wow. Every leader gets the same amount of time every day. If I was running the largest tech company in the world. I get 24 hours in a day, and I wasn't. I was leading a church of 8001000 people. I had the same amount of time as anybody else on planet Earth. And so I did this hack because there's a lot of great time management books, but you can read those. What I realized is I'm not going to get more time. It is not a renewable resource. So I made this switch. And the switch I made was I was going to stop saying I don't have the time and start admitting I didn't make it. So what that meant is if my sermon was running late, I would just tell myself I didn't make the time for it. And that's a pretty big admission, right? It's like I had 24 hours in a day. I misused them. And if you start doing that, great things can start to happen. Because if you're on your fifth week in a row where you didn't have time for date night with your wife, that signifies you've got a deeper problem. And so I started making time for date night, making time for my kids, making time for my friends, making time for my sermon writing. And eventually that clears a lot out because you're like, well, I'm not going to make time for that. So try this little hack. Just banish the phrase I don't have the time from your vocabulary and start saying to yourself, I'm not going to make the time for that, or I didn't make the time for that. Because what'll happen is you'll get way better at time management. Second thing is time management. You're managing a fixed resource. You've got to start managing your energy, not just your time. Everybody talks about time management. Not enough people think about energy management. So you already know the principle. I'm going to teach you because I'm going to ask you this question. Would you consider yourself a morning person or a night owl? I mean, we intuitively know that 8am and 8pm do not feel the same way to all people. Like, for me, I'm a morning person. 8am Fantastic. I'm firing on all cylinders. I'm ready to go. I'm excited to start the day. I have a full brain, I've got a full heart. I'm in a good mood. 8:00pm kind of dragging a little bit. If you're night owl, it's the opposite. 8:00am it's like, who gets up at this hour? What is wrong with these people? And 8pm you're just getting started. Maybe you're just ramping up. And I talked to one guy once who said that his best hours are between 10pm and 3am I'm like, good for you. I can't get anything done except close my eyelids and sleep between 10pm and 3am but hey, if it works for you, it works for you. There's not a wrong answer. It's just your answer. And so I want you to think about your day in the terms of three zones that are marked by color. Green, yellow and red. Your green zone is when you are at your best. So for me, I'm a morning person. My green zone is about 7am to 11am and then sometimes I get a little burst after lunch and I get pumped in my green zone. I'm like ready to go in the morning, ready to write. I've got a clear mind, clear thought, I got energy, I'm in a good mood and I can pound out a sermon in the morning and at 8am in a way that I can't possibly do it at 8pm I mean, I can write at 8pm it's just not going to be as good. It's going to be slow, it's going to be sloppy. So that's your green zone. When are you at your best? When are all the juices flowing? When are you ready to go? And when are you really, like, at peak performance? That's your green zone. Usually there's three to five hours a day. That's it. This episode is brought to you by LifeStone Ministries. If you teach an adult Sunday school class, you know the pressure. You gotta walk in prepared. You gotta have something meaningful to say and you have to be ready when somebody asks you a question you weren't expecting. Keeping your class engaged when everyone's minds are elsewhere, that can be the challenge. So I want to tell you about a resource that's been helping teachers do exactly that for generations. It's called Adult Bible Teacher. From LifeStone Ministries. Adult Bible Teacher gives you a verse by verse exposition of every week's lesson. Built in discussion, questions, practical points, research helps, and lesson preparation notes. Everything you need to walk into your classroom with confidence every quarter. It's built on the same comprehensive approach as the Bible Expositor and Illuminator, one of the most trusted adult curriculum resources in the country. It's available in standard and large print. And if you were asked to teach, let Adult Bible Teacher help you do it. Well, head on over to lifestoneministries.org Carrie to order and Learn more This episode is brought to you by Compassion Canada. For over 70 years, compassion has partnered with local churches around the world to release children from poverty in Jesus name. And the thing I love about it is this isn't charity at a distance, it's the local church getting to know a child, walking with a family, and transforming entire communities. If you're a church leader here in Canada, where I live, this is a powerful way to live out your mission beyond your walls. My home church, Connexus, has seen that impact firsthand. We as a church have sponsored over 600 children over the years. So have my wife, Toni and I. So partnering with Compassion for me is the real deal. You can visit compassion.comcarrie and click the Canada link to learn more. That's compassion.comcarrie Click the Canada link and you'll learn more. The opposite is your red zone. That's a time of day when you're exhausted. You have two brain cells left. You're either gonna fall asleep at your desk or you need a coffee or you need a nap. Like, for me, that's between 4 and 6 in the afternoon. When I get to 4 o', clock, I'm kind of like, all right. Nothing good comes out of me. If I hold meetings in my red zone, people ask me, kerry, can we. Don't even ask me the question. The answer is no. No, no, no. How do we shut down this meeting quickly? That's your red zone. Now, for a lot of people, it's late in the afternoon. I think for more people, it happens right after lunch. You'll have a nice sandwich at lunch and you come back to your office and you want to fall asleep at your desk and that's your red zone. Usually have one or two hours like that in a typical day. It's not wrong. It's just because you're human and you're not a robot and you don't just run on the same energy all day long. Green zone, you're at your best. Red zone, the opposite. You're not at your best. Yellow zone is everything in between. So you might have six, seven hours in your yellow zone. And you're not at your best, but you're not at your worst. Like, those can be very productive zones. I do this podcast, I do my writing in the morning, questions or episodes like this. And then I often do my delivery in my yellow zone. So, green zone for writing, yellow zone for delivery and interviews. I'll do a lot of my meetings in my yellow zone because I don't need my absolute Peak energy. Now, if it's a really important issue, might move it to my green zone. Now the mistake a lot of leaders make is you don't. You might know your green zone, but you don't protect it. And the mistake I was making when I was burning out was that I would take breakfast meetings in my green zone. And you know how breakfast meetings work. You gather at the restaurant at 7:30. It's supposed to be an hour, but it takes an hour and a half. Then you grab a coffee at a drive through. You go into the office, everybody wants to talk to you. It's 10 o'. Clock. By that time you look at your phone, it's like, oh, I have all these texts, I have all these emails. You answer those and it's lunch. And what have you accomplished by lunch? Nothing. Your sermon isn't written, your most important work isn't done. And then you say, I'll get to that later. And you don't get to it later. And it rolls over to Tuesday and then Wednesday. That's why so many preachers Thursday night. It's like, I still haven't finished my message, sorry kids, I can't go to your game tonight, I gotta write it. And you're finally finishing up on your Saturday night special on Saturday and you blew all your family time. You know what you do? Block off your green zone and just start doing what you're best at your most important work, when you're at your best. And when I started writing my messages in my green zone, I was shocked. I was done by Wednesday and then by Tuesday. And you know when you're done a message four or five days before Sunday, it doesn't matter what happens in the rest of the week, you're done, you got your message done. And for the last decade, when I was a lead pastor, I would often get my entire sermon series done, written, outlined and into production. Before I preached the first week, I was working a month in advance. In fact, right now I'm getting ready to preach. All my messages are in six weeks in advance. And you're like, well, you're not preaching a full time load anymore. No, but I'm writing a book and I'm doing podcasts like this and traveling to conferences. Like just when you protect that green zone, you get ahead. So manage your energy because you got a limited amount, not just your time, you'll get way ahead on that big thing you need to change and is stop letting other people hijack your priorities. Because this is a great theory and you might say Wonderful. I'm going to protect my green zone. But then somebody wants to meet with you, you get a knock at the door. People are like, can I just have five minutes of your time? Which is never five minutes of your time. And that's why if you've ever had a day where you've had nothing on your calendar and you're like, oh, this is going to be the most amazing day. And then five o' clock rolls around and what do you get done? Nothing. And here's what happened. You let other people hijack your priorities. And this is what you need to remember. Nobody will ever ask you to complete your priorities. They will only ask you to complete theirs. That's what every transaction is. Every email you get, every text, hey, can you meet for lunch? Hey, can you look over this report? Hey, can you help me with this project? And before you get mad at other people, you do the same thing to them. Every email, every text you send is like, I know you're busy, but can you help me? That's the way life works. But what you need to do is have the discipline to carve out that time, your green zone, so that your most important work gets done. Because nobody is ever going to ask you to accomplish your top priorities. They're only going to ask you to accomplish theirs. So how do you do that? Well, that's our next point. Number six. Got to move to a fixed calendar. So if you took out your phone right now and looked ahead at your calendar, what do you see? So this is May. Let's say you're listening to this in real time. Look at October. How does October look? And if you're like most people, you look at your calendar, it's like, it's blank. It's amazing. October is going to be phenomenal. This is what you tell yourself. Reality is that's how you thought May was going to be back in January. Why? Well, because you had nothing in your calendar. And here's the truth. Blank space in your calendar is a trap. It looks like freedom, but it's jail disguised as liberty. And if you look at my calendar, this is May. If you look at October, I don't know, you can see this or not if you're watching. I have pre decided how I'm going to spend October. I know that in the morning I'm going to be working on content. I don't 100% know what content, but I'm a writer. This is what I do. So I got my green zone blocked out and I have. You can look at 2026. You can look at October 2029. It's pre decided. Because I know as long as I keep doing this stuff, I'm gonna have really important stuff to do. I need to block that out. And I need to decide how I'm going to spend my time before others decide for me. If you look at my Saturdays, you know what they say? Family time says, family time, personal time. Why does it say that? Because before I burned out, I used to have nothing in my calendar. And I'd be at some social event, and people from the church come up to me and they would ask the inevitable question, hey, Kerry, what are you doing on Saturday? And I would look at my calendar, I would see nothing there. And guess what I would say. Exactly what you would say, nothing. And then they say, oh, good, good, good, good, good. So can you come help me move my piano on Saturday? Or, you know, hey, can you come to my great aunt's 50th wedding anniversary and say the prayer? And what are you going to say then? No, I can't do it. They already know you have nothing on. And then I'd have to go home and explain to my family, when my kids were young, I can't be around this Saturday. I got to go do this thing I don't want to do. So then after I burned out and rebuilt my life, I started writing in all of my priorities. Like, priorities, I should say Saturday says family time, personal time. I have my workout scheduled. I have Sunday scheduled for downtime, church, obviously, and relaxation. And then when people ask me, hey, Carrie, are you busy on Saturday? Are you busy on the weekend? I just open up my calendar, I look and I go, oh, actually, I have an appointment. I have a commitment. And usually that solves the problem. Now, sometimes they say to you, well, what kind of commitment do you have? And I'll say, well, I have a commitment to my family. And then I know you're nervous. You're like, well, what if they say something like, hey, is your family more important than me? If they ever say that, you know what you do? Just call the police. Just call the police. Have them arrested. Take them away. No, I'm kidding. I mean, most people don't get to that level. But then you've got an excuse. You're like, I got a commitment. I'm sorry, I can't make it. You don't have to explain to people what it is. And if. If it does, get to know it's my family. Most people will respect that. And if they don't well, that's not on you now you're saying, well, what if. What if it's a really cool thing I want to do? Then you can change your mind. You can say, actually, I really want to go to that concert. Yeah, I tried to get tickets. I couldn't get it. I'm gonna go. You can change your mind, but that way you've always got an out, and it's an honest out. And if you don't care for your family and you don't care for yourself and you don't work out and you don't get some downtime, you're not gonna be in ministry in three years. So don't apologize for putting your family in your calendar. This episode is brought to you by glu. So a question for you about this ad spot. You ever ask yourself, like, how did I end up listening to this ad right now? Well, that's called placement. And the placement of this ad comes from glu. And I've got Brian Brown here, who leads the GLU team, focused on helping your ministry grow your reach, because I think what they built is really worth knowing about. So, Brian, tell us a little bit about placement and glu's role in that. Thanks, Kerry. GLU has built a way to reach Christians who are already engaged, already reading, listening, and looking for resources that line up with what they believe. We're talking about podcasts just like this one, trusted publishers, trusted voices, quality content channels, and they're all connected. So if you're a business or a ministry or a nonprofit and you've ever wondered, I wish we could get in front of an audience just like this. That's literally what our network is for. At Glue, you're not buying some random ad placement. You're reaching the people who are already leaning in. So it's strategic. And if you want to know how it works, if your organization wants to be featured in spots like this one here or elsewhere, contact Glu by going to glue.com grow. And I want to spell that for you. That's g l o o.com grow. Another principle. This one's really important. The people who want your time are rarely the people who should have it. And the people who need your time will rarely ask you for it. There is a paradox at the heart of leadership. That the people who most want to meet with you are rarely the people that you should be spending your time with. And the people who should be getting your best time. Think about it. Your top staff, your family, your closest people, your best donors, your best volunteers. They almost Never ask for it. They don't want to be a burden. And so what happens to a lot of leaders when you schedule meetings is you schedule the wrong people in the person who emailed you five times and wanted to have that meeting because they're so mad about this. I'm not saying you shouldn't meet with them, but, man, when you've got your top staff who need to be developed, who really need your time, need your guidance, need your insight, when you've got that top volunteer, a key donor, when you've got that new family that's so close to faith, that could really use your time, and you've got the person who's the constant complainer in your meeting slot, like, that's not a good use of time. And the other thing that happens when you're continually meeting with the wrong people, I had a CEO tell me that allowing the wrong person into his green zone can reduce his peak energy from five hours to five minutes. You have that one meeting and it's like, oh, I'm drained for the rest of the day, right? One bad meeting in the wrong window and the rest of the day becomes a red zone for you. Meanwhile, you know, this is the other thing to think about. And I know this is a hard teaching, and a lot of people might disagree with it because you're a pastor, but the people who are perpetually in crisis, who have what I call a flat learning curve, I've noticed that when I meet with them, and I meet with them repeatedly, they often don't seem to improve, no matter how much I invest in them. They just want to meet again. And these people will often be the people who will happily consume as much of your time and energy as you will give them. So here's what I've come to understand, is that giving your best energy to the people who aren't growing isn't kindness. It's misallocation. And sometimes it comes from a place where you just need to feel needed or you feel guilty about not meeting with them. Meanwhile, your family, your kids, your top volunteers, your top staff, the people who rarely ask for your time but need it most, they get ignored because you met with people who you didn't need to meet with. So here's the question I want to leave you with. Who's getting your best hours? Is it actually the people that deserve them the most? Because you should schedule them in and then say to the other people, hey, there are other systems that can care for those needs. Or I met with you once away, you go so anyway, I know that teaching is not going to sit well with everybody, but it has really helped me. And you know what the paradox is? I'm serving exponentially more leaders now than I ever served when I burned out. And I have more time off and I'm meeting with the right people on my calendar. And because my calendar is clearer than it used to be, I can give you content like this. We can connect like this. So here's the summary. Live in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow. Think about the micro adjustments you can make and the macro adjustments that you can make. Because sometimes, you know, people are like, well, Kerry, that's great. You're the CEO or the lead pastor. You can get to do whatever you want to do. And I have to take my kids to soccer five nights a week. And then we have music lessons and hobbies and all this stuff. Listen, nobody made you take your kids to soccer or to football five nights a week. Nobody made you do that. The government did not make you do that. You chose to do it. We had a rule with our kids, especially after I burned out. You get one sport and one music per semester. That's it. We're just. We only had two kids, but it's like we are limited human beings. And you know what? They did okay. They did okay. So you want to make adjustments to your life so you can get some proper sleep. You get a Sabbath. You get some days off. You have a hobby so that you have something to move into, to lean into. You want to care for your heart, your soul, and your body. And you want to make really good decisions. Just a word to those of you who are married. You know, one of the reasons when you get exhausted and numb, one of my rules was don't have an affair. Still haven't had an affair. By the grace of God. Don't ever want to. But when you get exhausted, people make really bad decisions. And one of the best things you can do is schedule a date night. I said to a leader recently, you know, imagine your marriage was to end tomorrow, or, God forbid, your wife passed away and you met somebody new. You know what you do? You would pursue that person that you were interested in. Well, now flip that and pursue the spouse you're married to. Right? Have a date night. A regularly scheduled date night. We've had a regularly scheduled Friday night date night for years. You want to run offense, not defense, on your marriage. You want to build a relationship that lasts. You want to date your spouse like you would when you first met her. You know, and I do that now. And so I'm very, very grateful. I have a full life, not just a full work life. And when you have a full life, you're on a much better path to avoiding moral failure. So let's recap what we've learned so far. You don't need to get back to normal. You need a new normal. Secondly, time off won't heal you when the problem is how you spend your time off. Third, stop saying you don't have the time. Start admitting you didn't make the time. That's a really important admission for yourself. No, I didn't make the time to get my message ready. Keep saying that to yourself. You're gonna do better. Fourth thing, start managing your energy, not just your time. Fifth, stop letting other people hijack your priorities. Sixth, move to a fixed calendar. Decide ahead of time how you're gonna spend your time before other people do it for you. And then finally, the people who want your time are rarely the people who should have it. And the people who need your time are rarely gonna ask you for it. So you need to schedule it in. Hey, I really hope that if this hits close to home that you get the help you need. Call a friend, call your doctor, reach out to a therapist, and just let them know, I'm not okay, but I want to be okay. And if this really hits close to home, my bestselling book at yout Best, might be the best thing you can get. Be sure to check it out. Pick up a copy and if you need the cheat code, if you're like, what were all those points? Remember this. Live in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow. So thank you so much for listening to this miniseries. Remember, we are giving away 20 copies of yout Best for free to listeners and to viewers. To enter the giveaway, visit Carrie newhoff.com giveaway by June 7th coming up on the podcast, back to our regularly scheduled programs. We have rich velodas, Dr. Nicole Martin, Eric Reese from the Lean Startup, Joshua Becker, David Epstein. That was a fascinating conversation and a whole lot more so if this conversation was helpful, leave a review or comment wherever you're listening, don't forget to share it with a friend. And I really hope our conversation today has helped you personally see a growth barrier you're facing and scaling.