The science of excitment - intro
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Intro
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Shawn Buttner: [00:00:00] Our happiness is directly tied to how we feel about our progress in life, how we feel we're attaining those big and meaningful goals in life. And when we are making progress, we feel happy. We feel excited. We feel energized. We feel like we're living our best life.
And when we feel stuck, we feel like we're in a rut. We feel like we're not making progress. meaningful progress on the things we find meaningful. That's when we get into overwhelm. That's when we get into stress. That's when we get into feeling like we're just going through the motions. I'm Shawn Buttner.
I'm a certified high performance coach and host of the meaningful revolution podcast, which we're listening to now. And I help creators connect with their sense of progress so they can continue to create sustainably. I've been a certified high performance coach for nine years. I'm a former software engineer for Apple.
And now I coach people into helping find their meaningful [00:01:00] revolutions to help connect with what's meaningful in their life.
Agenda
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Shawn Buttner: And so in today's episode, we're going to talk about The science of feeling excited about your life again, in my opinion on that. We're going to talk about why everyone needs to define their meaningful revolution to feel progress and excitement in their life.
We're going to talk about what leads to burnout and why stress, it could be a factor, but isn't necessarily the factor. We're going to talk about why your meaningful revolution needs to be holistically tied to meaningful goals. And We'll talk about that life's hard and we need to consciously make design choices in specific areas in order to feel progress.
And then finally, we'll talk about the science of feeling excited for your life again, and what that is, and with a couple of questions for you to [00:02:00] take, a journal with, and to really start thinking about your future. and how we can add more of this excitement to your life. If you want it, if you need it, if you are down for it.
So with that said, let's get into this episode of the meaningful revolution podcast.
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Body
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Shawn Buttner: First off, we're going to talk about the science of how to feel excited about your life. And simply my opinion is finding your performance
Find Your Performance Edge To Feel Excited about your life
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Shawn Buttner: edge, leaning into your high performance is the way to connect with meaning in your life. And it's done through being very clear on what you find meaningful. what are your values and how are you representing that in your life?
What are you going after? That's important to you. in all areas of your life. And [00:03:00] what are your clear goals in your health, in your finances, in your career, in your family and relationships and friendships and hobbies and all those things that people do that they find meaning in. And so getting really crystal clear on that.
these. are all goals that we have in high performance coaching. And having coached people over the last nine years, I've found that when you can help them connect with their performance edge, then they tend to feel more excited about life. And it could be a client that I had years ago who was a teacher and was really feeling the stress of that job through various reasons, had an idea to strike out on her own with some curriculum that she developed and talking about it, talking about the possibilities, defining [00:04:00] what values were being violated in her current job that she wanted to exemplify in starting a business, we developed a plan and she started a business and it was amazing.
Or had another client who, was a psychologist and, had a couple of different things going on. She just wasn't clear what she wanted to do next. And so we'll call her Barbara. And Barbara, had a couple of credits she needed to study to get to her, to get a particular certification that allowed her to make more money.
And ultimately, Barbara started a whole program on a very specific niche in working with schools in trauma informed therapy and started, teaching other therapists how to do this process, developed a curriculum that was bought out by a university and went from feeling a little discouraged and feeling a little confused about what to do, [00:05:00] knowing that they wanted a change, and not knowing what to do, through finding out and identifying what was meaningful in making the change, and then got excited and then implemented on it.
And so this is the power of defining your meaningful revolution, and making a change. steps, taking steps and developing a plan to make it a reality. from, again, my client work or even in my life, I've figured this out too, having left corporate America two times in my career so far, wanting to start businesses and with various levels of success in doing that.
But I learned a lot about myself in that. And the second time is still ongoing, right? So that's second phase is here after I left Apple in 2019, still working on my business, but I feel so much more connected to the work. I feel so much more, rewarded by the efforts I'm putting into the business, even if things haven't gone exactly the [00:06:00] way that I had planned.
we can go into that in a different area, but, I think that's really important that we know and we define. are meaningful revolutions.
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Why YOur Meaningful Revoution Needs To Be Holistic
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Shawn Buttner: I'm going to go into why your meaningful revolution needs to be holistically tied to meaningful goals, right? and this means that we're not only focused on our career.
We're not only focused on finances. We're not only focused on friends and family. We're not only focused on. Getting healthy, right? These are all components to living a healthy life, and I think you can be the most prolific, smartest person in any room, but if you can't walk up the stairs without winding yourself, you're not going to have the impact, and you're not going to feel good about the things you're doing because your health is so weak in that particular instance.
And [00:07:00] it's Important too because very early on in my career at a, my first job that was not Apple, I'll have a couple stories on that those times, but, when you're not clear holistically on your goals, you can have some very terrible things happen. disclaimer, this is a disturbing story. This is, disturbing.
might be triggering because it's talking about someone passing away. And so I'll give you that clear warning right now, if you're sensitive to that. Because this is a pretty formative story for me, but it's also very terrible. But it illustrates when You know, why you need to focus on more than just the thing you're working on, right?
I worked at this company right out of, college, and doing corporate IT work, and we got notified [00:08:00] via email one day that one of our fellow co workers, came into the office, during the summer in the South, so it's like a hundred degrees and had left their newborn baby in the car because they were so stressed about work.
They forgot they're supposed, they thought they had dropped off the kid, didn't drop off the kid. The daycare was calling around Hey, everything okay. and that child ended up passing away, And so this is, I think, within a year of me starting my career. And the message in this email was, Hey, don't talk about this.
Number one, just, okay, this happened. Give the family some space, which is good. But it's just we're just not going to talk about this. Don't ask your manager. Don't talk to anyone about it. just keep it to yourself. Know that this happened, there's nothing to do here. But what really struck me [00:09:00] was how could you be so stressed out and so singularly focused on your work that you forgot about your kid and left him in a car and ultimately the worst thing happened?
I remember that not sitting well because this particular job is very demanding of your time. It, I was fresh out of college and single and this job consumed every waking moment to the point where I would dream about work and solve problems in my sleep because I could never fully get away from the job, which is fine, when you're young.
But, It really struck me that not feeling like you could push back, even though we all have that agency to, ultimately led to this very terrible situation. And and again, in this case, if you're solely focused on your performance at work and you're not able to say, you know what, I'm [00:10:00] going to be coming in late because I have to get the kid.
to daycare all the time or I need time with my family. I'm not coming in for extended hours because I have a family to take care of at home. it's a very important thing that we need to be thinking about or that we don't want to damage our health and we're gonna have another story about this,
here in a second. So,yeah, We need to have holistic goals for our health, for our career, for our family and friends, and for our general wellness. These are four buckets of goals. And I encourage you to think of, if you were to live your ideal life right now, if you're like, if I could work on the things that I really worked on, if I could have the impact and build a legacy and make, the connection with others that was important.
What would that look like? how would [00:11:00] you be exercising in that type of environment? How would you be connecting and building deep and intimate relationships with your important people? How would you be able to financially take care of what you needed to for the family? How would you be able to have an impact with your work that was more, was meaningful.
you did stuff that helped people. and how could you do that in a way where your mental health, your ability to enjoy the work was also held sacred. And I use the word and phrase held sacred because each of these are important. And. Your ability to push back when one of them gets out of whack to prevent the tragedy that I just shared in the early story is essential for feeling like you're making the important progress in areas of your life.
So that's, the first thing is [00:12:00] that's why we need these holistic goals to be tied into your meaningful revolution, right? another thing to think about is. This phrase, stress not tied to your meaningful goals Leads to burnout, right? Stress can be a good thing. It could be motivating You know We live in a society where people try to shrug off stress a lot or at least that's what social media says if you take a look at YouTube or Instagram or whatever, but ultimately if you are stressed out because You want to further You The goals that you have for your family.
or you really want to make the greatest software product ever, right? Like when I was working at Apple, it's great to have stress that ties into your career, that ties into helping your family, that ties into helping you feel good about your work, right? I want to do a great [00:13:00] job with the thing that I'm working on because I know millions of people are going to use it, are going to see this thing and it matters, right?
We all want to feel like our work and efforts matter. And so when you're stressed at and I've seen this in the corporations I worked on that's first job that I talked about before, edit.In my first job out of college, I was in 2007 and that was right when layoffs happened. So like I got hired.
It was like a month or two. And then this organization announced that, even though they were making a bunch of revenue, based on how they were positioned in the market, they were going to do preempt or preemptive. job cuts in case the market continued to still be like bad. It was a kind of a BS thing.
But, end of the day, they ended up doing a bunch of layoffs. [00:14:00] Andthere are people that have been working on some projects in the IT space, four years have been doing like 80 hour weeks pretty consistently, which is insane to me. But again, it leads into that, not being super balanced in priority.
people allowed that to happen. people thought that they didn't have a choice, which is totally valid. I'm not trying to be flippant about that. Like sometimes it doesn't feel like you can stand up and be like, no, but at this particular job. They announced the layoffs in the main office and then they said, Hey, we haven't figured it out for the people in the tech division.
That's coming in two weeks. Hold on to your butts while we sort this out. And so we had a lot of stress in the organization about people, are they going to keep their jobs or not? And so for two weeks, nothing got done. And [00:15:00] when the layoffs finally did and they like cut whole teams, because they're like, okay, we're not doing this project at all strategically out the door.
So it wasn't even based on performance. It was very random.
the whole office burned out, right? There was a lot of stress that was not tied to helping people advance their careers because they just, offloaded a bunch of other work to people that remained, right? And everyone was thankful because they kept their job. they had a bunch of stress that was preventing them from working out, that was preventing them from sleeping.
it was a very intense time. And so coming out of that, we had a bunch of stress for no reason, right? Or again, those projects were there with people for 80 hours. the job was important. But it's also not tied to any other goals, right? I want to keep my job so I can continue to pay my mortgage, which is a very noble thing.
Again, not being flippant. It's a [00:16:00] very important thing to pay your bills. And the trade off in this particular situation is that you never got to see people outside of work. and again, generating a bunch of stress and the stress of not seeing your family, if not working out, if not feeling excited to go to work or that your work mattered.
And you're just going and slogging through leads to burnout. And so that's actually why I ended up leaving that organization is after too many years of late hours and being asked to do a bunch of extra stuff. and then seeing examples of this being like people not mattering. Ultimately, you start to think Hey, like maybe this isn't the organization I want to stay at long term because on the term of a dime, it doesn't, you're gone.
And so I ended up leaving that job, started my own business that failed and then ended up at [00:17:00] Apple, which was amazing.but again, stress not tied to meaningful goals that you have in your life. That's not addressed will lead to burnout.
Choose The LIfe You've Designed
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Shawn Buttner: the next thing we're going to talk about today is we want to choose a life that you've designed, right?
Steve Jobs had, I'm going to paraphrase here, but has a quote about, he talks about, We are living in a life. that other people have designed. Companies, sometimes culturally, sometimes your family,sometimes the government, there's all these different agents out in the world that have designed the life that you're living.
And there's a magic that happens when you realize that you can change that design for yourself. And you [00:18:00] can make a dent in the world. It's something correlated with that. yeah. What I really like about that idea is that if there's something you don't like in your life, you can change it.like I said, in that previous example of that first company I worked with, I got burnt out.
I was just it took me two and a half years of being burnt out and trying to make it work and trying to, Say, Oh, it's me. And there's something inherently broken in myself because I've been beat up by my employer. And again, like it was a great experience. I learned a lot, but shaking off that sense of stress, or not seeing how that stress was tied to the goals that I had for my life, for my legacy, for my career, for my health, Really Got me thinking like why am I choosing to be here?
And so the choice of leaving that job [00:19:00] again was What would a better life look at right? And I have a couple of high performance questions. I'll get to here at the end of this Section but
If you're not happy with how your life's going, how can you design it to be a life that you're proud of, that a li a life that you are excited about? A li like, what would that look like? And so often too, if you feel like you're stuck and you feel like you're in a rut or you feel like you can't change, what we really need to do is engage in our imagination, engage in our future projection, right?
thinking about how things could get better. in order to help us figure our way out of it, right? It's like when, when you boil a crab or lobster, and so much of that pressure and stress and that unhappiness is slowly turning up the heat as you're boiling in [00:20:00] the pot.
And so imagining that, Hey, if this continues, it is. In a year, in, excuse me, in a year, in five years, in ten years, it's going to be an exponentially increased amount of heat in the pot. That'll trigger action instead of just sitting and trying to figure it out. So you get that step thing by thinking like, if this, my life continues the way that I'm continuing right now, in a year, I'm going to be just as miserable.
And in five years, I'm gonna be five times as miserable. In ten years, I'm gonna be ten times as miserable. Okay, if that's true, now's the time to make a change. Now's the time to decide something needs to break. I'm going to break, or how I'm doing things is gonna break. And I hope if you have a choice between that, you choose to break and How you're doing things and not break yourself.
[00:21:00] Okay. and so that's about choosing a, designing a life and working towards making it happen. And it's also what I specialize as a high performance coach. I help people change how they're doing things so they live into their meaningful revolutions mean into the things they find meaningful, they find joyful to, to find their confidence or find the joy in the present moment.
And if you are interested in checking that out as just a free thing, there's a link in the show notes below on how to sign up for a free strategy session. sign up for these quick. I'm gonna stop this particular promotion for the free session at the end of October. and I think I'm gonna start charging for these sessions now.
if you want to experience this. coaching process to help you find the things that you find meaningful or to help you figure out how you can tweak some things [00:22:00] and start designing your life in a more active and positive way. Definitely check out this free one hour strategy session. you'll go through an application.
I go through the application before it to make sure that I can identify some points that we can really focus on the call. They get on the call, we talk about it, we develop a plan for you, that's personalized to you, and then at the end of the call, you either are like, this is great, I'm going to go do the plan, and most people do that, but some people are like, this was great, I'd love to continue meeting regularly, and then we talk about the different coaching packages I have.
that's the free strategy session, again, it's in the show notes below, you go to, ShawnButtner. com backslash coaching, get signed up for your free session. Again, I think I'm gonna start charging those, charging for this at after, or starting November, 2024. so if you're listening to this in the [00:23:00] future, just know that's the time that's going to flip, but hope to see you there.
I know people love the strategy sessions. I'd love to help you out there. Okay.
Shawn Buttner: Final. section here is how does high performance coaching help you define your meaningful revolution, right? Um,high performance is helping you find sustained levels of progress in your life without damaging your relationships and your health, which is another way of saying just by not burning out.
And when you are in your high performance, you're living your high performance as you are out there. growing and making progress. You feel more confident. It's called high performance living is you're feeling more confident. You're feeling more joyful and you're feeling more present in your life. And we achieve all of that through focusing on five different metrics.
We help [00:24:00] you find clarity again in yourself, What you want, how you're showing up in the world, and your plan to achieve your big goals. We do that by taking a look at your energy, how you are approaching things, how you are taking care of your body, your mind, your soul, all of that stuff. Getting that in alignment to your goals.
We help you focus on courage and taking bold action towards your meaningful revolution, so you can feel that progress and you're making a conscious effort to every day or every week towards building that meaningful revolution, those meaningful things in your life. We've talked about throughout this episode, we talk about your productivity.
So what are you doing that's actually getting you results and how you can tweak to either make that better or, get rid of distractions or things that aren't serving you. And we talk about influence or how you are connecting and motivating people and getting people. [00:25:00] on your side and helping support your goals, right?
So high performance is finding results in those five areas, right? So I will talk about that here on out on this podcast ad nauseam, because if you can improve on one of those areas, we know through high performance science that will help you, in all the other scores, right? And so it's this Feedback loop, right?
So if you get more clear, you're going to have more energy, you're going to act more boldly, you're going to be more productive and have more influence. And if you work on how productive you are, it'll help you get clear. And so it's a really great feedback loop. But that's this high performance work of body of work, right?
It's done through the High Performance Institute has. Tons and tons of, academic studies and anecdotal studies and [00:26:00] reports from people that have gone through the high performance coaching process to show how it helps people feel more purposeful and feel more confident in the things that they're doing and feel happier and more excited about their life, which is what we're talking about in this episode.
So I have three questions for you. to journal about your performance and what you're doing now. And I've found this audience generally is, either people who are creators and have chosen to further a particular idea, either through books or podcasts or newsletters. And so they are, committed to building this meaningful life and they're struggling maybe with the business part or they're struggling with adopting and feeling good about the process or worried about their mental health as they get [00:27:00] more popular or there's more demands on the career from them.
And that's where high performance can really help. High performance coach can really help. there are the folks that are working at a job that are, And are thinking about transitioning into a more meaningful career. And that could be just finding a different position in your current organization that you connect with, that you can add a lot of value to, that really lights you up.
And that's great. And that could be a meaningful revolution. Or it could be dedicating yourself to a career. raising your kids in the family because your wife or your husband makes enough money for you to stay at home, right? I don't really care, about that. But,so your Meaningful Revolution are the things that are meaningful to you.
Um,you have an idea and you want to lean in more either to that identity of raising your kids [00:28:00] or, You're thinking about, maybe I should write a book, or maybe I should start a newsletter, or maybe I should become a coach, or you're thinking about a transition, but you're not quite ready to pull the trigger on it.
Or, you're somebody new that's hey, this could be something that I like, And for each of these categories, the people that are creators, the people that are thinking about transitioning into a more meaningful career, people that are just curious and haven't really thought about it. Too much?
Here are some questions for you to journal about to help you figure out if you're living your meaningful revolution, or if you might need a change, okay? The first question is, are you living your truth? Are you living your full truth? Are you living the way that you envisioned yourself for yourself? Are you making enough financial Are you making enough income?
Are your finances set? Is your [00:29:00] family and relationships set where they need to be? Are you feeling the way you want to feel every day? Are you building something that's going to leave a mark on the world, or leave a legacy for kids, or for a foundation, or to further a cause? Yes or no? Are you living your truth in each of those areas?
Yes or no? If you are, I am cheering you on. It's so hard to find it. And it takes a lot of dedication, a lot of clarity, a lot of conscious choices in your life to manifest that in your life. And so I'm so excited for you. And if the answer is kinda or no, I'm here to just cheer you on, right? Sometimes we just need a new question in our life or something different in our lives.
that pulls us into more focused action, right? And this question was for [00:30:00] me, right? When I was working at that first nameless job, I went to a seminar, a high performance seminar, and this question was asked of me, and I remember in my journal being very disappointed in myself and beating myself up, so don't beat yourself up, don't be like me in this regard, and Probably in most regards, but definitely not like this, but I was beating myself up because I was not where I wanted to be in my life at 26 or 27 at the seminar and That question Sparked that in the question, what are you going to do about it, Shawn?
And I said, you know what? I'm young. I'm not really tied down. this job really is weighing on me. I want to do something different. I'm afraid to do something different. But, what do you got to lose?And so I started to come up with a rough plan and I [00:31:00] gave myself a deadline to leave my job. I remember calling my mom in the parking lot of that seminar, this hotel that the seminar was hosted at.
And I go, Hey mom, I'm finally going to quit this job. I think I'm going to work on this. And here's my quick plan. And she's quiet on the phone and then she goes, Oh, thank God you have been stifled there. You've seemed really unhappy. I'm so happy you realized it was time to move on and that you're doing something about it.
At first I was like, Oh, thanks mom. Like you could have told me before, but I think in her wisdom, she realized I needed to figure that out on my own. And it's a very powerful moment. And I hope you have that powerful moment for yourself. If you. Didn't like the way you answered the question, are you living your truth?
But a lot of good can come from it. A lot of, again, thinking about your future, thinking [00:32:00] about what could you do to live your truth?I think that answering that question, if you said no, is imperative and can really change your life like it did for mine. So are you living your truth? The second question I have for y'all is are you taking bold action towards your Big ambitions, your meaningful dreams, your meaningful goals.
because so many of us are like, Oh, I want to write a book.again, talking about my mom, she always wanted to write a book. And for most of the time growing up, she talked about it. And then finally she's I'm going to take a class on writing and I'm going to write a book. And so she wrote four books in her life and I'm so proud of her for it.
She never was able to get an editor to get it up and going but she took bold action after being afraid for a lot of my childhood and felt so proud of these books and [00:33:00] things she created and again like it doesn't take it can feel like it takes a lot to be bold to chase a dream that you have or to chase something that you want for yourself And once you start getting into it, it ends up being a lot easier than you think.
So what areas do you need to take bold action in your life? And how are you going after it? So that's the second question. The third question is, are you making meaningful progress? And really this should be, are you making progress at the pace you want to? And so this could be a function of do you know the things that you're supposed to be doing to get you the result in the shortest amount of time?
some people are like, yeah, or some people are like, I have no clue. and for me in my second, my coaching career now, this has been the big drag on [00:34:00] my mind. I'm not making meaningful progress at the rate that I want with my coaching business. with the podcast, with the YouTube channel.
And really like thinking, coming down to it, I have been using the force trying to figure this stuff out by myself. And so in the last couple of years I've, figured out who are the best people in podcasting, at YouTube, at coaching, and running a coaching business, and marketing, and these other meaningful skills.
And How can I learn from them to get best practices to maybe skip this at reinventing the wheel up by myself? And that's what I encourage you to do. if you're not making meaningful progress, or the progress at the rate that you want, go hire a coach. Go hire or find the person that does it the best in that [00:35:00] particular career.
And, figure out what they're doing, right? And then figure out how you can incorporate their best ideas into what you're doing, to make meaningful progress. And again, if you've answered no to any of the questions we just posed here, are you living your truth? No, I'm not. Are you taking bold action?
No, I'm not. Am I making the meaningful progress at the rate I want to? No, I'm not. Then consider opting in for that free one on one coaching session listed at below in the show notes, because this process of high performance coaching that I am trained on every year is the best way to help you build your meaningful revolution.
Bad Metaphor
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Shawn Buttner: All right. We're going to wrap up this episode with a new segment called Bad Metaphor. And what this is, I'm trying to, I'm going to try to create a metaphor based on what we talked about in the episode that sums it up. It might be great. [00:36:00] It might be rough. It might not make sense. This is supposed to be fun.
as we try this out, definitely let me know, leave a review on Apple podcasts, if you like it or not. And here we go. So we talked about the science of feeling excited for your life again, how it's how you connect to your meaningful revolution or the meaningful goals in your life. We talked about those goals being holistic.
We talked about how you can design your life and have agency to change the design of your life and how it's tied to your performance, right? The. meaningful progress you make is based on your personal performance. And so it's if each of these areas is a ship in a fleet, if you don't have clear goals set up and you don't have a clear set of rules on how you make turns and execute [00:37:00] maneuvers, if you don't have, A way to connect the stresses in the environment, like islands or reefs, to help you navigate the oceans.
Then it's going to be really hard to get all the ships to where you're going intact, right? You might go in every which way, you might sink a couple along the way. but, if you have strong goals, a strong, set of rules of how you live your life and how, and a way to design your life, to make those decisions, a way to funnel stress into productive direction and to help drive your performance.
Then you can keep your fleet together as you navigate the world.
What did you love?
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Shawn Buttner: So what I loved about this episode is that we get to talk about the meaningful revolution. What I think the meaningful revolution is. I think we got a couple of good stories and, this is a new segment too that we'll end [00:38:00] on, but I will leave you with this question.
What did you love about this episode? And if you loved this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts, leave a comment, leave a rating. It helps us out, helps us grow the show. I'd love to hear from you. you can definitely do that. You can also in the show notes either sign up for that strategy session or sign up for the newsletter, and this is the best way to get a weekly email with a little bit more on the episode, the journaling questions we talked about written down for you in case you're driving or at the gym and don't have the time to pause and, actually answer the questions, but you want to do that later.
Every week you get the email newsletter with the questions from the relevant episode.
What to c h eck out next
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Shawn Buttner: we got some really good stuff coming up for you. if you love this episode and you're like, man, I really am feeling like I'm burnt out. And I, really want five strategies on how [00:39:00] to prevent or get over burnout.
Check out the episode.linked below in the notes too, about, so you quit your job due to burnout and it's a YouTube video. If you're watching this on YouTube, I'll have you directed over to that right over here or here somewhere.
And, with that, thanks for joining us on The Meaningful Revolution. We'll see you guys in the next episode. Take care.
