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Hello my friends and welcome to another episode. I'm so excited to have you here. We have to talk about something really important and that is how to eliminate all of the overworking and the overload and the overwhelm and whatever you wanna call it that so many of us engage in every single day. You have to learn how to do less. It is critical and I'm gonna explain to you why. Before I do, I just wanted to let you know that today is the last day to join the Quitter Club at my yearly heavily discounted rate.
If you want to actually create a career that you love and you wanna get off this rat race and you want to figure out what you want and quit your job, all of those things, I want you to join me in my membership in the Quitter Club. Typically it's a monthly membership for 1 97, but two times a year I do a big sale and the membership goes on sale for the whole year at 9 97, which is $83 a month, which is less than what you spend at Target. You can get all of the coaching, all of the worksheets, all of the videos, all of the help, community, private podcast, feed, everything that you need in order to work step by step through your burnout, figuring out what you wanna do, figuring out how to do it and going after it. So go to lessons fromquitter.com/quitterclub and join me.
One of the things that I teach you in the Quitter Club that I am very passionate about, if you've been around me and if you've been in the club, you know that I am always ranting about this and it's learning how to do less. It is eliminating all of the overworking that every one of us is engaging in all the time. And I wanna talk to you about that on this episode. I'm gonna teach you how to do it, like the steps that I want you to go through. I think that before we even get to the steps of like how to eliminate it, you truly have to understand how big of a problem this is. We have been programmed in a society that has taught us that hustle is, you know, king is above all that. You should work hard, play hard, you should give 110%.
And over time that has translated into constantly having to do the most in every area of our life. I'm sure you've all now seen kind of the statistics or people talk about how working moms today spend more time with their kids than stay at home moms did in the sixties or about how for so many of us, obviously like we are all working way more hours because we are connected to our computers and our phones. Gone are the days when you got to leave work at five o'clock and you didn't have to do any work until the next day. You couldn't 'cause it was at the office, right? It was like physically impossible. Uh, we don't have that luxury anymore. And back then, not only did you leave when you went home, there was only a couple of things that were vying for your attention.
You know, maybe there was the evening news, which was like an hour long. A couple of like news programs, radio programs or your choice was to hang out with your family, maybe read a little bit. That's kind of what you had. Now you have to constantly make a choice every minute about how you're gonna spend your attention and there are infinite ways to spend it. And so you're constantly having to decide like, should I be hanging out with my kid or should I be, you know, scrolling TikTok or watching Netflix or building that side hustle or doing the grocery shopping on my phone or going for a walk to get my exercise or meditating or whatever. We're inundated with all of the things that we should be doing all of the time and we wonder why we're so exhausted because we are never allowed any downtime.
And so, so many of us are burned out because of the constant pressure to do more and more and more and more. And the reality of this is, is that society is not gonna change until we do. And luckily there has been like a counter wave, a counterculture to like hustle and a lot of people are now really like leaning into the fact of like not wanting to do as much and wanting to have more of like peaceful quiet lives. But that programming is so ingrained in us. And a really quick test for you to figure out if you've been ingrained with this belief is I want you to think about what your brain does if you're resting if like on a Saturday you just wanna take a nap or you wanna lay around, I want you to think about where your brain goes. Like are you feeling guilty about it?
Do you beat yourself up? Do you call yourself horrible names because you think you should have done more over the weekend or you just wasted quote unquote two hours, right? If you constantly are thinking that you're not being productive enough, that you have wasted so much time that you should have done more, that you never get enough done, those are typically signs that you have adopted. This belief that every minute of your day should be productive, that you should constantly be doing as much as possible, as much as the next person or more that you could have gotten more done if you were more responsible or you know, manage your time better. And a lot of it is BS 'cause humans are just not built that way. We are not built to be robots to go, go, go every second of the day to go at the same speed every hour, every day for months and months and years and years and decades and decades on it.
Like we are animals and we are in nature and everything in nature is in seasons and so are humans. So are our hormones and so are our lives. And there are different seasons that affect our bodies, right? Like people wonder why they get tired in the winter more. It's like that's natural. But in our society we've been taught to ignore that. Like it doesn't matter if it gets dark at five, you should still be willing to go, go go all night long, right? And so we've sort of lost our way in what is natural to the human body and to the human mind. We used to think that technology was gonna give us our time back, right? Economists in like the fifties and sixties were predicting that with the advent of computers when you know computers could do the work of an accountant in 30 seconds, like what would take a human, let's say a couple of hours, they thought that we would have a lot more leisure time.
Now we all have seen that that is not what has happened with the continual like changing and progressing of technology. We have less and less leisure time because we constantly find things to fill up our time with. And in order for you to step off of this hamster wheel, if in order for you to get off of the rat race in order for you to actually eliminate burnout, you have to learn how to stop this because it is not gonna happen from you like taking a bubble bath or taking one weekend away. That is not what's gonna eliminate burnout. It's truly like shifting the way that you think about your time and how you spend it. And so you have to start like rejecting society's messages about needing to be productive, needing to be more organized and use every minute of every day and use it to the best of your ability.
Um, you have to start really like figuring out where do you get time to just be and to do nothing and to numb out. Because this idea of work-life balance that so many people are in this like perpetual struggle to obtain is not an actual balance of hours. It's not like saying like, oh you know, if I only worked eight hours a day, then I could have more balance. You can't if you're also stuffing the rest of your day with all the things that you should do that you don't actually want to do because you think it would make you better in some way. And so this goes beyond like the problem of work. Now obviously it happens a lot at work as well because we think that we should be more productive. We think we should take on more, we should be the star employee.
All of that has to change. And so I want you to really understand that like it starts with that because if you just try to kind of balance your time or you try to even delegate or eliminate things, if you're not changing the beliefs behind it, then you just feel guilty because yeah, you might be like physically changing certain things you might not do certain tasks. You might decide like, okay, I'm not gonna work out or something. Let's just say I'm gonna give myself some time to just be, but then the whole time you're gonna feel guilty or I'm, you know, when you're resting, your brain's gonna be like Eh, but you know, we could have used this hour to get that project done or we could have finally organized the closet or we could have started on dinner and now we don't have anything to eat or whatever.
And so until you can learn how to manage your mind of like, no, I should be resting, that's exactly what I should be doing. That's what my body needs. That's what I need, that's what I want. That's what makes me happy and it's okay and it, I deserve it and I don't even have to deserve it to do it, right? So it has to start from there. That's why I focus so heavily on mindset stuff is that I can teach you all the hacks, you can learn all the, like how to get more done and less time or whatnot. You know, I can teach you hacks of like how to eliminate things. But if you are so racked with guilt that you've eliminated something and you think that it makes you a bad mom or a bad worker or a bad wife or whatever because you eliminated this thing, then you're gonna go back to pick it up, you're gonna do it again 'cause you don't wanna feel that guilt 'cause that guilt feels terrible.
And so it has to be concurrent. Like learning how to eliminate things and delegate things has to come with you. Like really shifting how you view your life and your energy and your time. Okay? So we're gonna talk about that a little bit more. But I'm gonna tell you the steps that I think that you need to go through in order to eliminate this overload, this overworking, okay? Step one, it's like a very illuminating exercise that I think you all should do is I want you to start by writing out all of the things that you think you should do. All of them, okay? I want you to take as many pieces of paper or you can type it out if you want. And I want you to write out like you can go category by category, you can label work and then home and then relationships.
You could do like even that you can split up into like spouse, family, friends, you know, boyfriend, partner, whatever, kids you can do different relationships. And then you can make a category for your health and one for your mental health. You can make a category, I don't know, for whatever you have in your life, spirituality for um, joy, you know, you get the point, you get to pick the categories. A lot of the ones that I recommended, I think most people should have. But you get to decide what works for your life. And then I want you to go through under each. And I want you to write out everything that you should do that you think like a good employee, you know, spouse, partner, parent, sibling, whatever friend does. And I want you to give you yourself as much time as you need. 'cause I want you to really think about all of the things like for work, it might be a lot of things, right?
What are all the things that you should do at work? It should be a lot of tasks. There can also be like I should, you know, help people when they need help. I should volunteer to be on the DEI committee. I should, you know, whatever. If those are things that you think that you should do, you can pause this and do that first because I want you to see how exhausting it is just to look at it, just to look at all of the tasks I have to do at work and then at home. I think I should make dinner, you know, three nights a week and I, the house should be organized and it should be spotless. And you know, I should redecorate this room or whatnot. And in my relationships I should have date nights with my spouse and I should make time for my friends and have a girls' night at least once a month.
And I should spend one day with each kid alone so that they have time with me. And every night I should be present with my children and I should play games with them. And I should be the one that drops 'em off and picks them up and I should, you know, know all their teachers and be at all the meetings and I should know their coaches and I should talk to them every night. And you know, if you have all of those like write 'em out and for my health, like I should work out three days a week and I should be eating more greens and eating more organic and I should take a, you know, all my supplements and eat more protein and whatever else they're telling you to do now on TikTok. Um, and on and on and on. And you start realizing it's quite literally impossible for the amount of hours you have in a day to do all those things.
And so there's a reason why every one of us is so exhausted is because we are trying to keep up with an unattainable level of work. We're trying to do too much all the time and then we don't notice it because we're doing this unconsciously. So we're trying to do all of these things so we constantly feel like we're failing. We constantly think I'm not doing enough because this is what happens when you have a lot of this unconscious standards for yourself when you have these standards of like, these are all the things I should do and you're not doing them. Let's say you're killing it at work. Let's say you're star employee, you're doing all the stuff right? Your brain isn't gonna like notice that. It's not gonna be like, oh yeah, maybe I'll notice for a second. But then it's gonna go to like, yeah, but we didn't work out at all this week and you didn't make it home, you know, before six on like two nights and you didn't get to put your daughter to sleep because you had to work on that presentation.
Like you really are a terrible mother, right? Or you really are really letting yourself go. We're constantly looking at what we're failing at, right? And that's why for so many of us we have this belief of like, I'm not doing enough 'cause we're only looking, we're not looking at everything else that we're killing it at. Let's say for you it's the opposite. Maybe at home you're killing it and you're doing all the things you wanna do and you know you're present with your children and you're super involved in their life and you are making food every night or whatnot, whatever's important to you. But then you're looking at like, but I don't work or I don't work enough or I'm not making progress in my career. Or I, I got passed up for that promotion or whatever it is. Like you've trained your brain to kind of find where you're failing and then you're focusing on that and that's happening because you have this laundry list of things that you should be doing and you're never gonna hit all of them.
And so your brain's gonna constantly point out which ones you're not hitting until you start realizing like, I don't need to hit all, there's no way for me to hit all these. Why would I think I should? Of course I'm not gonna be everything to everyone all the time. There's literally not enough time in the day and I don't want to. And so it's really important to kind of do this audit in order to see what you're holding yourself to. Because if it's impossible, then you're setting yourself up to fail and it, it almost becomes laughable when you look at it. You're like, well of course I can do all of that. So then we have to start letting it go. But we can't let it go until we know. So I want you to really stop and do this. The second step here for me is always really asking myself like, what season am I in right now?
And this can change, you know, really season to season can change year to year, it might be a couple of years. You really have to know where your priority is gonna land. And there is no judgment. Whatever you pick is fine. If you decide like right now my career is like my number one and I'm really trying to go hard and like get to a certain place and get promoted, great, that's totally fine. Then you have to know that a lot of your attention and focus is gonna go on that. And maybe what you're gonna be eliminating is in other areas, maybe what you're delegating. Like you have to realize like I'm just, it's not that you're not gonna do anything in other areas, it's just that that's not my focus right now is like, you know, go hard at the career. Maybe it's my family, maybe I have young kids and I'm like, you know what?
I just right now need to survive this and I need to be really, um, intentional with my time at home. The career is just gonna have to kind of be on autopilot and I'm gonna do what I need to do and I'm gonna keep my job and I'm gonna do good work, but I'm not going for star employee and I'm not going for, you know, every promotion or to take on more responsibility. And that's okay too because right now my priority in these couple of years is, you know, with my kids or maybe it's my health maybe right now, it's like the biggest priority for me is gonna be my health. So that's gonna be number one. Everything else is gonna kind of have to, again, not to say that I'm not gonna like be around my children or I'm not gonna be, but like I need to figure out ways where like it's okay for me to be selfish 'cause maybe my health is faltered and so I have to put myself first.
And that might mean that like sometimes my daughter's gonna be upset that I don't get to play with her 'cause I have to go on this walk or that, you know, I can't put her to bed, her dad's gonna put her to bed because I have to go to the gym. That's okay. It's okay for her to be upset. It's okay for other people to have feelings. I don't have to be everything to everyone all the time. So I think clearing that up for yourself and knowing where you're at can help you in your priorities of like what you're gonna eliminate, what you're gonna delegate. It is like really understanding like what is important to me right now. It can't be everything. If it's everything I'm just gonna drop balls everywhere, but I can know that I can constantly reevaluate which season I'm gonna be in.
And then we get to like the actual getting rid of things. And this is gonna be step three and four is gonna be eliminate and then delegate. Okay? With eliminate. I think a lot of times we think, well what, what would I like to do? Or I want to do all of this stuff, grace, we all do, but that's not reality. You're dealing with a finite amount of time and a finite amount of energy that is the world we live in. And so if I say I'm gonna give a hundred percent to my career, to my job, then that means I have zero leftover for anything else. If that's the calculation I wanna make, fine. But you have to understand, it's not like a, I can give a hundred percent here and I can come give a hundred percent here and I can give a hundred percent there.
It's not gonna happen. And so I have to make a conscious decision of like what it, where am I gonna divide this attention between, right? And so you have to really like figure out like if I wanna give more attention, let's say to my career, then maybe there are things that I need to eliminate at home or with my health or whatever. And what I mean by that is like, I wanna start with things of like what's just not important. Maybe it's at work, maybe at work I'm doing a lot of tasks that nobody even cares about. I, I remember I have a client, I had a client who like did these reports every week that took a bunch of time and then she was like, I just stopped doing it and nobody's ever asked me about 'em anymore. Nobody ever wants 'em. And I would spend like an hour or two hours doing these reports and it's been like six months and nobody even notices that.
There's no reports, right? And so like you wanna sort of look around and be like, what are the things I'm spending my time doing that honestly don't have to get done, right? I can completely eliminate, like let's say I used to make, I didn't use to do this by the way. Let's just say I did. Let's say I used to make organic muffins for my kids every day or every week, let's just say 'cause I thought that it's great for their brain health and they wanna eat it for breakfast. I can just decide that like that's really not that important. I can buy them or I, they can eat something else. They don't even need these muffins. We're just gonna stop this task that I had created for myself to do all the time that isn't really that big of a deal anymore, right? I'm gonna try doing something else.
So you wanna get to the place where like, you wanna think of it like money, right? Like you can only spend it in certain areas if you're gonna spend it in one, you don't have it to spend another and you just have to make a decision of where you wanna spend it. The same thing with your energy and the same thing with your time. Like, is my time better spent me making organic muffins or just resting reading for an hour? Would I be a better mother to my children if I took an hour to rest and read? And so I'm not super stressed out and I actually have more patience and I'm kind of a little bit regenera and like re-energized. Or if I make them these muffins and I'm stressed out and I'm biting everyone's heads off and I'm tired and I have to clean the dishes and I'm resentful, right?
Like maybe they don't need the muffins. Maybe we should get rid of that. And so you wanna like go through this list of all the things that you think that you should do and you wanna think about what can I get rid of? What do I really not need to do? And not that nobody will miss, maybe some people will miss if it's gone, but it's not gonna make or break my life or anybody else's life. It's not like a really major thing in at work or at home. You wanna start there because part of the goal is to get rid of as much stuff as we don't need to do, right? So if like I had created a habit where I have to journal every night, but it's causing me more stress, I don't wanna do it. I just have like, you know, had heard that your evening routine you should have, you know, a journaling exercise or breath work or whatever.
And it's causing me more stress to do it. Like just don't do it. It's not that serious. We don't have to do all the things everyone tells us we have to do. You don't have to have a 10 step morning routine and a 10 step evening routine. Like, you know what, I would rather just read my book. I I go to that um, example because that's what I would rather do. I'm always constantly like, would I rather do this or read? And it's always read. So I'm like, all right, I'm gonna spend this 15 minutes reading and now I'm happier and now I'm more rested. For you. I might be like, I would rather even just watch a Netflix show and veg out a little bit and give myself a break. So you're gonna start there and then you're gonna go to delegate. And this is gonna be hard for some of you because we, some of us have a lot of control issues and we have a lot of perfectionist tendencies and we think that the only way that it can get done is if I do it.
And um, the biggest lesson you can learn is that that is not true. It doesn't have to be the way that you do it. Your way is not the best always, even if it is, even if someone else says it at 80%, it's better than you doing it so that you don't have to do all the things. And so you have to start learning to ask for help. And that may be from your coworkers, that may mean from your spouse, that may mean from your children, that may mean from friends, that may mean hired help, right? So many people actually have the means to hire help, but don't do it because they feel guilty 'cause they should be the one doing it because like a good wife does this or it's a waste of money. And I want you to just really question it. Is it a waste?
Is that money worth more than your time and energy? I'm not, you know, it's a, it's a personal calculation. Sometimes it's sometimes it's like, you know what, it's not worth me pa spending this much or this isn't that big of a deal, I'll do it. And sometimes it's like, no, it is that big of a deal for me. I would rather have that two hours back. I would rather not do this work myself. I would rather pay somebody to come in and clean my house or I would, you know, I think you can like ship off your laundry or whatever it is. Can I delegate these tasks? There's so much more we can delegate than I think we even realized we can. I think a lot of people think that you have to be like super rich to delegate things and there's a lot of little tasks that anybody can find to delegate to, to kind of figure out like, can I get this off my plate?
It may not be the perfect way. I remember when I first started like ordering groceries, I didn't really like it because you know, when you're there you can kind of like obviously look at the produce and you can see if it's gonna go bad or not and you can kind of get the best produce or whatnot. And I was so stuck on this like, well no, I have to be there to feel the fruit and, and then I was like, you know what? It's not gonna be the best fruit and vegetables and that's okay. It still saves me two hours of like going to the grocery store, getting everything. Like I can reorder everything every week and yeah, it costs a little more for delivery. So I'm spending that money to get it delivered, but that money is worth the two hours that I would have to spend every week going grocery shopping.
For some of you maybe you love grocery shopping, that's where you get your piece. I'm not saying you have to do that. What I'm saying is that you have to sort of really start questioning, do I need to be the one that does this? I see so many, especially women who are frustrated that their spouses don't help, which rightfully so, but then they're so controlling in how they want it. The reason their spouses don't help is because they don't let them do it the way that that the spouse does it because it's not done the quote unquote right way. And you have to really like learn how to loosen the reins a little bit. Like maybe it won't be done. Maybe the laundry won't be folded in the best way. Who cares? At least you don't have to do it all the time only by yourself.
And so you have to allow things to kind of be good enough things to be at 80% things to be not the way that you would do it, and yet realize that you get so much back by allowing other people to help you. Okay? So you go through this step of figuring out after you've eliminated all the stuff that really isn't important that you really don't have to do, you go through and you figure out what can you delegate, what can you get help with? What is something that you don't have to do yourself that someone else can do for you that you can ask for help from, right? It's fascinating. Like I was actually thinking about this. I recently was reading a a parenting book and it was talking about like the fact that we don't give children responsibility and how that stunts their growth and how they don't grow up to be kind of independent and resilient because we're doing everything for them.
And I was realizing like how we've kind gotten this backwards thinking of like, I wanna protect my children from everything so I don't ask them to do anything and I do everything and kill myself for them when like easily asking them to do chores around the house is not only will help you is beneficial, is in their best interest. We'll help them learn responsibility and how to be a part of the family unit and how to contribute to things and how to be needed. So you have to start figuring out what to delegate. And then lastly, we get to like all of the stuff that you have to do and that's okay, hopefully like it is a much smaller list and you can get to a place where you realize that like maybe you don't have to do everything perfectly right? This is where a lot of the mind management comes from.
A lot of the stuff that I teach in the club where it's like learning how to manage your thoughts is can I do the things that I need to do, like step five, like all the things I really do want to do that I'm choosing to do? Can I stop needing them to be perfect? What is my definition of good enough, right? Can I find that definition and define it for myself? And then stick to that. If you can do those three things, you will get back so many hours of your week. And here is the key though, make sure you're not then just sneaking other tasks that you have to do in those hours. It's not like, oh, now I have all these hours back so now I can work out more or whatever. It's really like figuring out how do I find that time to rest and do things that bring me joy and don't need to constantly be productive.
Because if you don't get out of this trap of needing to be productive, you will never get outta burnout. You'll never find that balance. You have to find a way to let yourself rest and feel joy and do things just because even if there is no like end goal to it, even if it doesn't produce something at the end of it, it is just for the sake of experiencing it. And if you do that, again, I feel like this is the key to learning how to eliminate the overwhelm and exhaustion and the burnout that so many of us feel all the time. It's not gonna happen magically. No one else is gonna do it for you. No one's gonna come save you. It's not going to like happen because you take one trip, like a vacation of one week a year and then come back to the same grind.
There has to be fundamental shifts in how you approach your day-to-day life and how you approach your rest. So I hope that you go through these steps and really figure out ways that you can start cutting things out so that you can find that balance that you want, you can find that life that you want. And if you want help, today's the last day to join me in the club for the annual price with all the bonuses that come with it. So you can go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and I will help you eliminate all the things that you shouldn't be doing. I hope to see you in there.

Hey, if you are looking for more in-depth help with your career, whether that's dealing with all of the stress, worry, and anxiety that's leading to burnout in your current career or figuring out what your dream career is and actually going after it, I want you to join me in the Quitter Club. It is where we quit what is no longer working like perfectionism, people pleasing imposter syndrome, and we start working on what does and we start taking action towards the career and the life that you actually want. We will take the concepts that we talk about on the podcast and apply them to your life and you will get the coaching tools and support that you need to actually make some real change. So go to lessonsfromaquitter.com/quitterclub and get on the wait list. Doors are closed right now, but they will be open soon.