Email To My Team On My Startup Burnout, Lessons Learned, & Finding A New Way Forwards.

Hi guys, I’ve been meaning to give you all a proper update on the more personal aspects of my journey this year but I haven’t had enough perspective on what exactly I’ve been living through until recently to be able to properly shape what I wanted to share. I want to share for a few reasons — the most obvious of which is that when one of the two founders who started the business you’re working in disappears from one week to the next (and you don’t know whether he’s coming back), it’s nice to understand more. I particularly wanted to share this with those of you who were recruited into Escape by me — Matt, Becca, Tessa, Janette, Sophie and Skye. Not because you’re any more or less special than the rest of the brilliant maniacs at Escape, but because I feel there’s something particularly personal and special about asking someone to join you to work on something you passionately believe in and them saying yes. And I have particularly felt like I wanted to give you guys an explanation for what has been going down. I also believe that the experience of burning out and the levels of self-knowledge and painful personal growth that burnout is catalysing for me include valuable insights for what Escape is really about, for each of our personal journeys, and for the journeys of anyone we seek to help through our work. Finally, since coaching with John in 2014, I have become increasingly aware of how much of the Escapee’s Journey is about self-liberation, self-awareness, self-knowledge, and personal growth. And how it’s much, much less about what we’re doing in the world as how we’re being. And if we can get the being part right, then we’ll be able to do much more effortlessly, sustainably and impactfully (regardless of what that actual activity in the outside world ends up consisting of). I just wish I could have learnt this lesson a little less painfully since first really understanding this distinction (still learning it!). It has become increasingly obvious that one of the core principles of the culture we want to build at Escape is an emphasis on self-knowledge. Can we create a working environment that helps our team flourish? I don’t believe we can flourish unless we properly know ourselves and take responsibility for both our light and our shadow, our strengths and our weaknesses, our brilliance and our demons. And clearly Dom and I can’t ask anyone to go anywhere we’re not prepared to go ourselves. So me sharing this story with you is also a demonstration of my commitment to act with integrity around that belief and our objective for what work can be like at Escape (and, of course, there is a beautiful alignment between our internal aspirations and the positive impact we want to have in the world of work together). With that said, I wanted to share three things with you: What does burnout feel like? What do I think caused mine? What does recovery look like? 1. What does burnout feel like? Although I “hit the wall” on 23rd Feb of this year (leaving a meeting with Dom, Mikey and Ben in tears — no fault of their own!) and didn’t return to anything looking like work until mid-June (3.5 months later), really I had been burning out for at least 18 months, certainly since the first Escape Tribe in Jan-15. This 12 stages of burnout list on 99U is a good summary of what the descent can feel like. By Feb of this year I was at stages 11 and 12. I knew I was close to burnout in December last year (after working intensively with Keeno on autumn’s SUP Tribe I felt completely numb and had very little confidence or energy over our 2 week break). Which is why from January of this year I was only working 2 days a week in the office. It felt like a big step at the time but really it was too little too late, especially because all of the unhelpful thinking habits and most of the unhelpful behaviours that were leading me to burnout were still in place. It is only now that I have had all this time to recover and reflect that I realise quite how unsustainable my approach to working / doing / being has been and how I had been on the downward spiral for a few years, living out unhelpful habits that, really, had formed over a lifetime. It was only that I’d never before been in a challenging enough environment for them to become a serious problem in my life. So what does burnout feel like? Or, what did my burnout feel like? In all honesty, because I had so little to compare it to (I had battled varying degrees of anxiety since 2012 but never burnout or depression) I just thought I was going mad — basically that I was broken, weak, fatally flawed and would never be able to accomplish anything again. My primary symptom was an inability to do anything productive. I was completely allergic to anything that could be considered a “task” (regardless of whether it had anything to do with work and Escape). It is a struggle to describe quite how visceral my aversion was. I couldn’t pay a bill without bursting into tears. C would ask me to make a simple decision and I would freak out. My brain slowed right down. I couldn’t think clearly — which was especially hard for someone who does so much thinking (thinking was definitely part of the problem — but I’m getting ahead of myself here). I suppose what I’m describing is a complete loss of will; there was no motivation to do the simplest productive task. The other symptom was an absolute absence of optimism. I lost all hope about myself, about Escape, and about the world. Everything was bad. Everything was futile. What was the point of trying to do anything in a world without hope? I can’t tell you how all-encompassing this was. I couldn’t shake myself out of it. It also, strangely, felt like I was the only person who got it and that the rest of the world was deluded. Writing this now — from a place where I can once again construct perfectly symmetrical emails musing about Escape’s driving purpose and where I am, yet again, an optimist on more days than not — I feel like a melodramatic hypochondriac. Was I just shirking? Even now those few months feel like a bad dream. Can it have been that awful? When I was in the middle of it I tried to capture some of what I was feeling but I struggled to write anything down. I couldn’t describe the horror and hopelessness of how I felt because I could barely understand it. And I couldn’t imagine ever feeling “normal” again, so what was the point of even trying?! When you’re feeling this bad, your family starts to worry and they persuade you to go to the doctor. Even if, like me, you are suspicious of psychiatry for lots of good reasons, you’re so desperate to stop feeling so awful that you’ll try anything. And what the doctor tells you is that you’ve got depression. Not to worry, it affects XX% (insert absurdly high statistic) of the population every year. Just take this pill and you’ll feel better within 4–6 weeks. There are so many problems with this view that it would take another essay just to scratch the surface. In short, for me (and I know this is different for other people and certainly for other forms of mental illness) this wasn’t a satisfactory explanation of what was happening… 2. What do I think caused my burnout? Mainstream medicine’s narrative of depression basically says there is something wrong with you and a pill will fix it. So, once I could get out of bed (and having a baby arriving in a matter of weeks is a pretty good motivation to get out of bed and stop making it all about you at home!) I started reading widely about burnout and depression. And the narrative that made most sense to me based on what I was experiencing was that burnout/depression is a self-protective mechanism, a caring force from beyond your conscious mind that is telling you that you can no longer live your life in the same way, a call to change that you cannot ignore, and — if you can embrace it — an amazing opportunity for personal growth. Something that is so easy for me to write in a couple of paragraphs was definitely not clear to me back in March and April and May. I felt like I was crawling my way out of a pitch black cave with no idea whether my small movements were leading me further into the cave and lostness or whether my feeble efforts were going to show me a glimpse of light and eventually add up to a recovery. However, once I resolved to reframe this experience as an opportunity, not a painful sentence that I had to endure, I began, slowly, to get better. At the beginning this would have been impossible as I was so depleted and lost. I think that sleep, exercise and eating well gave me enough distance between how I was feeling and the part of me that could assess the situation and feel a desire to get better. It was also when I accepted that I would never return to my previous way of being that the heaviness began to lift and I could gradually orient myself towards the mouth of the cave. It was in gripping reality too tightly that I came undone, and it is now through surrendering to not knowing what I’m heading towards that I am putting myself back together. The great thing about depression (can’t believe I am able to write that) is that it strips you bare. There is no hiding from all of your demons. Imagine someone who truly loathes you and wants to do you harm. Now equip that person with every bit of negative information they need to have about you — all of your least attractive characteristics and all of your least generous thoughts. Then give them the sensationalist, exaggeration skills of FoxNews + Daily Mail put together. And then put them inside your head and imagine that their voice is 10 times louder than your own sane, compassionate, rational voice. That’s the beginning of what it feels like to torture yourself with all of your imperfections. So what caused my burnout? This is the hardest bit of this email to write, because I still haven’t unravelled a lot of this stuff and I definitely haven’t assimilated all of the lessons (although, to be fair, I think that’s a life’s worth of work!). What I do know is that I am driven by a perfectionism that can cause me a lot of pain if I allow it to get on top of me. Like most character traits, they serve some form of useful function for us (otherwise we wouldn’t have developed them and wouldn’t use them in our lives). However, like anything that might be considered a strength, it can easily become a weakness if it gets out of balance. I have also realised the extent to which my sense of self-worth and my sense of everything being OK in the world was linked to my work. Basically, if Escape was doing OK, then I was doing OK. If there was something wrong with Escape, then there was something wrong with me. Flawed thinking but incredibly hard to separate myself from. Depression seems to exaggerate everything about yourself to the extent that you can no longer ignore it. This experience has shown me that I have a pathological sense of responsibility. Literally name something that is less than perfect that could be tenuously linked to me (a Triber’s worries about their life decisions, someone in our team is upset about something) and I would not only feel immediately called to solve their problem but also completely responsible for how they were feeling. I think these few things I have outlined above are the core drivers that led to all my other unhelpful behaviour: being really sensitive and defensive, not delegating well enough, not trusting others, taking on too much, not being able to stop working, always being “ON”, etc. And the logical conclusion of all of this, eventually given enough stress… is breakdown. If you put enough electric current down a circuit that isn’t designed for, eventually the wires will burn out. In terms of the practical causes of burnout, the words intense and manic come to mind! Escape had been my first thought since waking up and my last thought before going to sleep for 6 years. Although, when I was away from Esc, I wasn’t always visibly working… on some level I still was. I can’t tell you how long-suffering C has been about things like phone/email addiction and finding her husband wide awake at 4am frantically jotting down notes for something he considered to be absolutely critical. A caricature of an unhealthy day: leaving Esc after an event at 11pm, having been in at 7am to run an Esc Monday / Tribe taster. Hyper-vigilantly scanning my phone all the way home — checking all the Facebook group notifications, checking Slack, checking my email. Replying to anything and everything. Repeat. I would often not take my face out of the screen from the door of 1 Fred’s Place to the door of the boat — lassoing wifi at every tube platform, downloading my next dopamine hit. Not taking any time during the day to relax or recharge. I know all of you know quite how frazzled and wired you can feel after a full-on day at Escape (and that’s probably without my hyper-sensitivity to caffeine!). There was literally no respite. In short, once the wheels came off and I reflected on the previous few years, I realised that I had been running almost purely on adrenaline, hyper-vigilant fight/flight mode for years. It now seems so obvious how unhealthy and unhelpful behaviour like that is. But at the time, I didn’t feel like I had an alternative. Why? Because of the combination of how much there was to do and how much of it felt both important and urgent — overlaid with my perfectionism and unhelpful belief that if I didn’t do it, it wouldn’t get done. The tragedy about this approach is that it isn’t even the most effective way to get things done. Work smarter not harder, etc. I also now realise the extent to which my life had got crazily out of balance — friends, family, hobbies and physical health had all been massively deprioritised in order for me to serve Escape more. Of course, I would have served Escape much better with a more balanced lifestyle. My thinking would have been clearer, I would have been able to respond to situations rather than simply react, and the quality of my work and leadership would have been far better. [In my search for causes and avenues for recovery, I have also been on a parallel line of enquiry involving my physical health. I have been working with an amazing nutritionist/herbalist and the various medical tests she has asked me to do showed a body completely out of balance: deficient in vitamin D, copper, zinc, magnesium, and various other important compounds and B vitamins which showed a methylation cycle out of balance. Dangerous levels of ammonia (body not detoxifying properly). Candida (yeast) overgrowth in the gut as well as unhealthy bacteria and parasites which throw both your digestive and your immune systems off balance. I also did the 23andme DNA test which is a fascinating mapping of your genes and a guide to the areas where you have vulnerabilities in (so you can blame your parents ;) !). I’ll share more about this for anyone who is interested but it’s amazing how indivisible the body and the mind are. In many ways this information, especially the genetic data, is more self-knowledge that I can use to guide my decisions and behaviour in life.] 3. What does recovery look like? I don’t want to go back to how I was before. So recovery is a challenging concept. I am trying to get somewhere that I have never been before in my life… and, as a result, I don’t know what that feels like. What I do know is that I can’t go back to the previous me — and whenever I do get to close to the most unhelpful aspects of my old behaviour the pain is so bad that there’s no way I can stay there. I was joking to a few of you that I’m like the kid who got drunk on whisky aged 14 and can never touch it again. My challenge isn’t to avoid repeating the same mistakes again (although, of course, it is and I will), it’s to find another way of being in the world where I can still be ambitious and have a positive impact but without all of the unhealthiness. So I have a clear guide for how I can’t live my life going forwards and I have a bunch of insights into the demons that drove that approach. I am less clear as to what the alternative looks and feels like but — in true Esc style — I am taking small steps forwards into the unknown in order to create a new reality for myself. I have to live my way to a new reality, I can’t think or analyse or read my way to it. In practical terms, my recovery has involved doing a bunch of sensible things with diet, supplements, and other daily habits that have helped me get back on an even keel. I started working with Elle on the inner journey which has been incredibly valuable. I had many of the pieces of the puzzle but was struggling to put them together in a coherent way until we started working together. I also reengaged with Escape, which was a crucial part of getting better as it involves returning to the source of my triggers and exercising new muscles of awareness. This has been challenging but crucial (it is amazing how powerful my default settings are and quite how much presence is needed to steer myself away from them). I still have bad days when it feels like I’m back at step one and I might as well give up. These are usually when I’ve tried to rush my recovery and snap back into my old mode. But, fortunately, those days are now massively outweighed by good ones where, although things still feel fragile, I know I can find a new way of functioning in the world and things feel optimistic. I have had amazing support from loads of people through this time but it was Dom’s unconditional understanding and support that has brought me back to my love affair with this idea called Escape and — as a result — has helped me save a huge part of my identity that I thought I would have to sacrifice in order to ever feel normal again. And to think that he was showing me all that compassion at a time when he could understandably be feeling really hard-done-by and abandoned makes me appreciate it even more. I think we show our true colours when things get hard — and Dom’s attitude and leadership this year under a really challenging set of conditions mark out an exceptionally good and strong person. What does this all mean and why share it? For Escape… One thing is clear, if we create an environment where people burn out then we are not escaping the city, we are not helping people flourish at work, and we are not redefining success for careers. I am not the only person in our team to have been on the burnout spectrum — in fact, we probably all have. This is not my definition of success (well self-knowledge is, but burnout as a route to self-knowledge definitely isn’t!). In terms of what my insights about myself might mean for Escape’s culture and our individual journeys… I have more questions than answers. But I do think that we need to create a culture whereby we are all encouraged to do the uncomfortable personal work / growth that is central to each of us flourishing. I think this requires both understanding our triggers and taking responsibility for how our demons / shadow can negatively impact us, Escape and our team members. I know what it’s like to feel fear and decide that the cause and the solution for uncomfortable thoughts and emotions are outside of me. I know what it’s like to blame others for triggering my demons. And I know what it’s like to engage in really unconstructive behaviour because my demons are running the show. I’m not wiser than anyone else in this team. And I’m not sharing this from the perspective of “look where I’ve gone, you all have to go there too”. All I know is that the experience of burning out this year has shown me that an entire way of operating was unsustainable to me and has forced me to look my demons in the eye. It’s as if I am learning to walk again after an accident. My challenge today is learning to regulate my thoughts and emotions and behaviours as a child would so that they have a positive impact on myself and those around me. And this (painful) opportunity is the silver lining of all of the discomfort from burning out / breaking down — an experience that I would have done anything to avoid and now wouldn’t swap for anything, because it has opened a door into another way to live my life — a healthier, more human, more awake, more sustainable way. Now I’ve just got to walk through it ;) As I said at the start of this email, I have wanted to share this with you for a while. Although I love sharing if I think it can help others, hitting send is going to feel extremely uncomfortable. However, I thought it was particularly appropriate to send this as you guys embark on a week of team stuff, starting with tomorrow’s team dynamics session. We need to start having a different kind of conversation at Escape… I’m not clear on the exact contents of that conversation but I know that it needs to happen if we are to chart a brave path towards being a genuinely 21st Century Organisation. Process and structure needs to happen too but they need to flow from this conversation — rather than happening before it or in parallel. The conversation has already started and I hope this email is a contribution. It is going to take all of us. When it gets uncomfortable let’s lean in, not lash out. When we’re triggered, let’s see what we can learn about ourselves and how we can use those insights to improve relationships rather than falling into judgement and defensiveness. And, finally, let’s do everything we can to make Escape a place where people can learn lessons about themselves, grow and flourish without having to breakdown in order to do so! Have a fab week together. I’m sad to miss it. Have fun. You deserve it. Thank you for all of your hard work and courage. x PS. Not sure if everyone is on the [email protected]/* */ email group yet. Please forward on to anyone not on it. You’re welcome to share this email if it feels appropriate. I’m working on sharing some of this stuff publicly and with the Esc Community. Hope to get to that over the coming few weeks. Rob & Lua — both discovering a new way of living in the world.