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EP 221: Beat Burnout with Jimmy Burroughes

Jimmy Burroughes is on a mission to change the way we lead teams. With years of experience as an Officer in the British Military and a track record of success as a people leader in top global organizations, Jimmy knows what it takes to build a high-performance culture that delivers results.

He realized that traditional approaches to leadership and high-performance team programs were leaving leaders and teams burned out, disengaged, and underperforming.

This is his second appearance after episode 179 where we go deep into his new book Beat burnout ignite performance 

Guest Links: 

Jimmy on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimmyburroughes/

Jimmy on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jimmybleadership/

Website: https://jimmyburroughes.com/

Book Beat Burnout: https://beatburnout.jimmyburroughes.com/book

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Transcript:

(This Transcript is AI generated)

Hello, and welcome to the Human Innovation Podcast, the podcast for innovative leaders. I'm your host, Jens Heitland, and today my guest is Jimmy Burrows. Jimmy is on a mission to change the way we lead teams. With years of experience as an officer in the British military and a track record of success as people leader in top global organizations, Jimmy knows what it takes to build a high performance culture that delivers results.

He realized that traditional approaches to leadership and high performance team programs were leaving leaders and teams burnt out. Disengaged and underperforming. That's why Jimmy and his team of experts from diverse industries have developed a proven approach to building high performance cultures that deliver profits, engage staff, and prevent burnout based on years of research and hands-on experience.

 This is his second appearance after episode number 179, where we go deeper into his new book, beat burnout Ignite Performance.

Please welcome to the show Jimmy Burrows.

 It's such an important topic, burnout, and I really love the actionable tips. For everyone who is intrigued into that book, we will drop the link in the end answer. You can find where you can purchase the book, where you can get more about Jimmy, we, you can find more about the book, but I love the action points.

So inside of your book, you are describing actions points in not even in mid chapters. So it's not always in the end of the chapter, but more when it is a bigger point you explain and then it'll go deeper. So we will go and explain a couple of action tips at the end of the podcast episode. So stay tuned for that.

Another thing I really want to highlight in the beginning is that, You describe frameworks, like the roles, frameworks, for example, and I love this action point where people who are reading books and specifically me I'm reading almost a book a week. I love if you have something that's complex but simplified in a way that people understand it can use it straight away.

That's a very, very cool thing. And another thing I liked very much, one example, you explain Salesforce and chapter one where you go deeper into why they use the 1 1 1 model. And for me, it's always interesting to have real life examples when someone is writing a book specifically about a complex topic like burnout and leadership topics.

Yeah, it's fascinating. So eager to go deeper into it. So, Jimmy, tell us what led you in writing your book Beat Burnout, and how did you come up with going deeper into that topic?

I guess there's so much of a backstory to, to this book and I, I said in the epilogue to the book it only took me about four months to write, like in terms of calendar days to write it. But it's taken me basically 20 years to create. And I think that there's a couple of pivotal moments, I'm not gonna go back through 20 year history.

A couple of pivotal moments that led to what has turned out to be this book probably the most notable of which was my own burnout. Having been a GM in a corporate organization. Working really hard trying to do an mba, trying to get promoted to be on the executive table of the, an organization trying to be the youngest c e o in the country, you know, all these kind of driving forces.

And it took its toll. And so in 2017, I, I burned out fairly spectacularly burned out and just took six months off to go and find myself. So basically going around Latin America, and it was during that time I started to reflect on, well, why did this happen? What were the reasons that led me to get to this state?

And for anybody who is experiencing some of the things we talk about in the book, the symptoms or the variables that we talk about in the book, it is not a great place to be on the brink of burnout. And it's very hard to be a high performer and be burned out. So what essentially led me to.

Think about why I had burned out and what was, what was going on or not going on. That meant I couldn't be a high performer. Then if we fast forward a couple of years, I'd build a consulting business and basically every team, every senior leadership team that I was sitting down with and having a conversation with about high performance teams or high performance culture, or hitting the numbers, bottom line, performance, whatever you wanna call it, they were all like, oh my God.

But we're just exhausted. We've been sprinting for years. You know, even probably since Covid, we've been rushing and running and it's more and more and more all the time. And I had this imaginary model in my head or metaphor in my head of an elastic band, and to me the concept of the elastic band is if we think about the elastic band as us, we've got all of these things that are pulling us to be high performers.

So that they're pulling us in one direction. So, you know, it's about all the things that you do in a high performing teams program, but we've also got all these other things that are pulling us backwards and people aren't generally aware of those. And what happens if you stretch an elastic band in two different directions, too much?

Well, of course it, you, it snaps. And, and that was the issue that a lot of these teams are facing. And so I started to look around and thought, well, is there a, is there a book? Is there a guidebook or is there a recipe that people can follow that helped them to detention the bad stuff and tension up the good stuff?

And there wasn't one. There are lots of, you know, five dysfunctions of a team and high performing teams books, but there was nothing that talked about this kind of elastic band concept and how we could reduce the tension in one area and increase his engine in one area, but making them almost the same variables.

So I had to try and create that. So over the course of the last three years, we did a whole heap of research with various organizations. And about 1300, 1400 employees. We interviewed them, we talked to them, we learned about them and started to glean what these variables might be. And that led to the creation of the book.

Once I'd kind of simplified it into the framework, which turned out to be the paste framework that was, that then felt like a natural point, a natural hopping off point to create this recipe book for creating a high performance culture and beating burnout. 

Before we go into the PACED framework and into the different chapters and what it is about, how did you feel it for yourself that, or realize that maybe that's a better word. I have burnout. What was a trigger for you that made you to realize, holy cow, I have burnout?

I think it was in, well, I mean, say without going into the PACED framework, I can tell you the situation. It was the wake up in the morning thinking. I'm not sure I've got this in me today. I'm not sure I can do this. I don't, and, and actually I'm working really hard, but am I making any difference?

Is this, is it, is it even worth it? It just seemed to be facing problems all the time and, and whacking moles. I found that I didn't have time to spend with my friends, with my partner, with my family. I found that I was just it felt like it was a very sort of hamster on the wheel existence.

And I was sleeping four hours a night and working seven days a week and traveling 10 days outta 14. And so I just, I was just exhausted. I was miserable. I was tired. I kind of got to the point where I didn't care anymore. And that to me was a bit of a warning sign. And when you read the book, you'll see that I unpack a couple of those stories, but you'll see that the symptoms are generally the lack of the variables that we talk about in the past model.

And I had all of them, I was demonstrating every single one of them. I think the only thing I probably had less was exploration, which is because I'm a natural learner, but there's a lot of people who aren't naturally kind of drawn to learning. So, that was probably my least serious variable, but I had all five.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Let's go into the PACED framework. What is the framework and how do you describe it in a simple way?

So the PACED framework is essentially if you think about it as a graphic equalizer on the old fashioned stereos where you kind of dial up the base or dial up the treble every single person has a different. Graphic equalizer setting through the PACED framework. But what we're looking for is for all the five variables, to be positive, not negative.

We want to have everything above zero. So the PACED framework is essentially five variables that we simp, that with distillation of all of the research are the things that make a difference to either being burned out or being a high performer. And it doesn't have to be necessarily a high performing individual.

We also apply this across teams. So would you like me to go through the five pieces at a high level? Yeah. Great. So P is about purpose and we have a framework in the first chapter called The Purpose Pyramid. And essentially it's the building blocks of purpose, which start right from the bottom with the concept of a personal purpose.

So you need to understand, What it is that drives you? What's your personal why? Then we move into role purpose. So what's the purpose of my job? Then we move into the team purpose. What's the purpose of the team that I work in and how does my job support that? And then organizational purpose, what's our organization here for?

How does our team support that and are we making a difference? And the two, if we think. So there's four layers in the pyramid, and that's pyramid is split into two halves. Identity and impact. So our personal and role purpose are all about identity. Who am I? Am I doing something meaningful? Am I feeling doing something?

I feel good about impact? Are we making a difference? the p it's the first chapter. The second chapter is all about the concept of abundance and. It's a great chapter to read, but essentially if we think about the positive being an abundant mindset, which you could also call a growth mindset, you could also call a learning mindset.

You could call it a positive mindset. Then the negative version of that is scarcity. There's not enough. I'm scared, I'm fearful. I'm living in a fight or flight reaction. So that's what, that's the second chapter is all about abundance. Third chapter is all about connection. So we as human beings are essentially tribal animals, and we need to feel connected to the people around us.

We need to feel connected to the plan. We need to feel connected to a sort of a path or growth of some sort, and we need to feel like we're connected to the community or the culture that we are part of in an organization. So we unpack the whole concept of connection. Fourth chapter is E is exploration.

And this was again, was a fascinating chapter to write. I've always been a curious learner. I've always been somebody who likes to get out there and find out new things. And I thought it was just me. But actually I realized when I was talking to people, it was either you're the hamster on the wheel playing whack-a-mole, using the same tools to solve the same problems, or you're doing that to your people, or you are the curious explorer.

And what we saw with all the high performing cultures that we worked with was, you know, the innovation cultures, design thinking, growth mindset, learning cultures. Again, again, again. They all were explorers. So it was this concept of almost like going off under treasure hunt. Everybody got excited about the treasure hunt.

And so we unpack the the concept of the curiosity curve in this chapter. And we talk about the consequences of exploring not enough just right. Goldilocks exploration and too much. And there's a great story in there where there's an organization that explored too much at the same time and burned their team out because they were trying to change everything at the same time.

And then d is downtime. So obviously we all need to recharge our batteries. We all need to refill the tank. And so we unpack what does that actually look like from a practical and a neuroscience perspective. And the whole book is kind of made up of three components. It's a scientific neuroscientific explanation in layman's terms, so people understand what's actually happening in their world and their brains and their bodies.

There's generally a story in every section. Which is a real life example, whether that's from my own experience or from our research experience. And then there's the answer, what can you do about it in the action tips? So that's the five chapters and the construct of the book.

Yeah, I love the story aspect. And you sent the chapter one to me to read and prepare to. This episode, I really loved how you explained the story of Charles, who is the person that's part of the story in chapter one

and, 

Charles.

and really going into a couple of details, and at least for me it was, you see yourself in this when you read that.

And that's always helpful when you go into complex topics. Like I said already in the intro, the framework helps, and then you go deeper into other frameworks as part of the chapter, which helps people to understand things in a more simpler way. Let's go through the chapters again in a little bit more details.

So if we talk about Charles and what I liked about that chapter was how do you get started with your own purpose before you even think about all others? Because leaders out there, if you're in a management organization, like both of both of us have been, it's all about how do you get the pace into the organization?

How do you make things fast, fast, fast. And the person you think least of is yourself. And you start in the beginning, Hey, find out your own purpose. So why did you start with that and how did you lead your own writing and the development of the book, starting from the own purpose into the rest?

 There's two things that spring to mind immediately to answer that question. Why do you start with your own personal purpose? If you want to run a marathon or you wanna lift a car or you want to climb a mountain, it's much easier to do that if that's part of you, if you have committed your whole self and your whole being to that task.

The same thing applies in business. If you want to run an organization, if you wanna be the CEO of an organization, or you wanna be on that top table, or you just wanna be successful and deliver high performance, it's much easier if your whole being and your whole soul are committed to that task. So you have to know what you are being and your soul are.

You have to know what the values are. You have to understand what are your driving motivators, what's your why? Because when it gets hard, it's the why that pulls you through. It's not the, you can be determined, but determination gets tired. You can be committed, but the commitment gets tired.

And so when the chips are down and when you are exhausted and burning out, it's the why that pulls you through. It's the purpose. So what we encourage people to do is to go and find their personal purpose first. And generally your personal purpose is made up of two key components. It's made up of the, we call them trauma experiences, but essentially it's the things that happened to you when you were a kid that made you want to make a difference later in life.

So, in Charles's example, he came from a very working class family. And his mom was essentially trying to find the money to feed the family. Multiple siblings, very busy family. His dad had two jobs and he grew up super, super poor. So he never had the opportunity to go to restaurants, to go to events, to go to any sort of, you know, fancy locations.

And so for him, the thing I'm gonna make a difference to was focused on giving people great experiences, making like those moments of joy for people. And, and obviously he ended up running this event's catering business. So that's, it's like the traumatic experiences that make you wanna make a difference.

The other side of it is the things that you hold in higher esteem or that you really value. And we, the reason we have the word values is because you value them and. So that's the kind of the positive examples of purpose. So for Charles, it was his mom, and I don't wanna kind of tell all the stories in, in the book, but it, it was, it was his mom doing something really special for his birthday that was not expensive, but was really well considered.

It was the concept of his parents working really hard. It was the way they created a family vibe and a family atmosphere for him and his siblings. And so for Charles the positive value was hospitality and hard work and creating wonderful moments. So it's very hard to be a high performer unless you understand what those things are about yourself.

And what happens, what we see very frequently with people who are burned out, who aren't clear on their purpose, is they have what we call cognitive dissonance. And it's essentially I'm doing one thing, but I'm thinking and feeling something different, and they are at loggerheads with one another.

When we get really clear with people and there's an activity in the book and the action tips that people can go through to help them understand what their personal purpose is, and then subsequently what their role, purpose and team and organizational purposes, then it gives you the ability to play well, actually, am I in the right role based on my traumatic experiences and my values?

Am I doing the right things? Is my why aligned with what I'm actually trying to do on this planet, like the impact I'm trying to make on this planet? It was almost serendipitous to meet Charles because he was literally the embodiment of the things I was thinking about.

So I found it really fascinating to talk to him. And he was, I guess the muse that I built the purpose chapter around.

Most propably, he was a little bit a mural to yourself as well in 2017 when you had the experience. I just see even myself when I was reading it, I was seeing myself in Charles as well, cuz I stepped out of. A very successful organization and a very successful job because it was not fitting to my purpose at that time.

I now can say that at that time I didn't know, I just didn't feel good. And I don't know if I was burned out, I guess not, but at least I was not following my purpose. And I think that's so important, what I like as well, that you then describe, or he's using that in defining as well the people he wants to work with or he hired in his company.

And I think that's what a lot of people can learn from that book as well. That's not related to burnout, but it is. If you get people connected to you who have a similar purpose or the same base values, like you mentioned, it's way easier to work with them because you are aligned on the purpose, you're aligned on the values.

Absolutely. And you know, there's later in, in chapter one, we talk about role and team purposes. And it's exactly that. So first of all, hire people who think and feel a similar purpose to you that their reason for being on this planet is similar to your reason for being on this planet. That's a great start.

But also clarify what is the purpose of your role and how are you making a difference? And then what is the purpose of our team? And let's all get aligned on that. And the analogy we use around team purposes. Let's get everybody in the boat facing in the same direction and rowing at the same time, versus everybody facing in different directions, rowing as hard as they can wherever they want.

And people will think, well, that's ridiculous. Why would I like, nobody would do that. But we do, we, we see this . Time and time and time again. And literally, you know, probably on a weekly basis, I, I'll, I'll take a team and I'll be facilitating and I'll say, so what's the purpose of the team? And you get 20 different answers.

Yes.

But if you ask everybody, do you know what the purpose of the team is that Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Cool. Can you write it down for me? Show me. And we put them on the wall and then people are like, oh. Oh, okay. Yeah. That we're not clear.

Yeah. And for, for me, what I love about that, because you work with executive teams, it's not a team that's working on the frontline. Maybe it is, but you work as well with executive teams who are leading and guiding huge companies. And if they're not aligned with their purpose, it's definitely not the best thing for the business.

You, you're so right. You know, and it, it's almost worse because when, when, and we see this, I say a lot time is when you have a unique team that's not aligned personally, roles team, and organizationally aligned on purpose, that creates a lot of work for everybody else because you've got, priorities are then not clear.

If you haven't got a clear purpose, your priorities can't be clear. So then you're generating extra priorities, essentially, you know, new projects, new initiatives, new ideas, because that's my, I think we should be doing this and, and I think we should be doing this. It creates extra work for the staff, for the teams around you.

Also it's very hard to create a team ethos if you are all pulling for different things.

Yeah.

And if your, if your executive team is dysfunctional, which, and I don't mean dysfunctional in Patrick Lencioni's terms, I mean like it's just not working cuz you're not clear on purpose. How on earth are the people around you gonna be delivering the best possible results?

It's like a diffused light beam versus a laser beam. There's the same amount of light coming out, but one's a lot more focused.

definitely. Let's move into chapter number two because I would love to cover all chapters and not to give too much away because I think everyone should read the whole book afterwards,

I hope so. That's, that's the goal.

so abundance give us a little bit understanding the difference between abundance and scarcity.

So, the analogy we use in the book is the concept of a campfire. And if you imagine in a group of people sitting around a fire in an abundant world, there's enough firewood for everybody and it's plentiful. And all you've gotta do is just, walk over there, pick up some wood and bring it back.

And everybody is happy to go and get more wood for the team. In a scarce world, there's maybe one tree on the horizon and everybody's gonna fight for it. Everybody's scared that they're gonna get cold, so they steal a little bit for themselves. They don't give willingly. And needless to say, because there's less wood in people's minds, the fire goes out and most people get cold.

And so what we do in chapter two is we unpack this concept of enough or not enough abundance is there's enough scarcity is there's not enough. And we talk through the three sections in that chapter. Really talk through what are the physiological reactions to there not being enough.

So we unpack scarcity first, and we talk about, and scarcity's the one that most people are actually familiar with. And so we talk about it from a physiological reaction. We then talk about it from an energetic space. So we go into the concept of how energy is neither created nor destroyed Newtonian physics.

It's just transformed from one form to another. But the scarce person is essentially blocking their own energy. They're blocking their own ability to share their authentic self because they're scared of something. And part of the chapter, one of the sections is around imposter syndrome. And that's being scared of being, found out.

Well, being scared of being found out is scarcity. I might get fired, I might get let go. I might be found out. People might laugh at me or scarcity reactions. And the final sort of view on it is how do you become more abundant? What does abundance look like and how do you achieve that?

And realistically, abundance is not happy. Clappy hippie dippy stuff. It's actually growth mindset. It's actually learning, it's actually checking in and, and putting, I, I kind of liken it to. Bringing more wood to the fire, but it's around how do I positively give my energy knowing there's more energy that's gonna kind of backfill.

It's that whole, if you think about it from a, a physics perspective, it's, it's the convection current, you know, hot air rises and cold air comes in to fill that, which becomes hot. And, and so you create this beautiful cycle of energetics. So we unpack that. and It's probably the most meta of the five chapters.

So I try to make it as simple as possible to understand in the course of the book.

How do people feel from a burnout that I guess it is the, they're thinking about scarcity and are limited by that belief and through that they're getting into burnout, or is there any easier way describing that?

Yeah. So if we get back to the graphic equalizer model the positive setting is abundance. It's, there's enough. I'm fine. It's gonna be okay. We're gonna get through this. I've seen this before. I know I can deal with it. My purpose is strong. I'm feeling confident. It's, it's those things.

Hmm. 

The, the scarcity reaction, the negative is oh my God, this is so hard. I'm scared. I'm gonna have to fight you. I'm running away from this. I might get found out. We're gonna get restructured. This is terrible. There's not enough budget. So it's that fear pl it's that fear related reaction that is unfortunately the reality for an awful lot of senior leaders and organizations.

 Especially since Brexit, covid, the war in Ukraine. All the things that are, you know, the contemporary issues that, that senior leadership teams are having to deal with, which are driving impact on staffing workplace. Um, Environments, supply chains and the like. There's a lot of fear going on, and it's that fear and the physical consequence of that fear, which is, is where we explore in the chapter because we essentially wanna warn people to what's going on and then help people to move to a more positive mindset.

And it is, it's interesting, you know, scarcity and abundance mo being more abundant, it actually requires building up an abundant fitness. So we use the fitness analogy as well. You, you can't just suddenly go, oh, I'm gonna be abundant today. It actually, it takes time. You have to work your way into it.

It's like rewiring your brain. So we're trying to give people the understanding and awareness, which is the first kind of piece of the, the change puzzle. So they can start to go down that new training program to rewire their brain.

Yeah. And the difficult thing in today's world is everything negative is getting hyped double or 10 x compared to positive things. If you

Absolutely.

Twitter as an example, it's the space where negativity is driven to the extent, and people are just, some people are just focusing on the negative and, and trying to get other people thinking about it as well.

Maybe that's not their intention, but if, if you that then relate to organizations, then people think about the negative effects of something. And if leaders are thinking about only the negative side of things, which is then the scarcity about it, then they're leading their people as well with that scarcity mindset and delivering in the scarcity to them in the same way.

So it's a negative effect on top of a negative effect. And that's the difficult thing.

A hundred percent. You know, it is interesting. I, I was talking with a talking with a, an executive yesterday who runs a pretty sizable organization and. They've been living and leading in crisis for the last four years. And they were, that was the exact words when I interviewed all the executive team at the start of the engagement, they all said, we've been in crisis management for four years.

And I was like, how can there be a crisis for four years? Like there's a crisis for one day, and then we go into solution mode.

Yeah.

And so when we're talking in the boardroom, he said, I, we need to stop using the word crisis because crisis is really triggering. Crisis is causing challenges for our people.

Crisis is putting people in a scarcity reaction the whole time. And he suddenly realized, petty dropped. He said, yeah, just that word makes people trigger adrenaline and cortisol and creates this massive scarcity reaction. He said, well, actually what we need to be creating is a senior leadership team that.

Is able to deal with vuca, you know, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. We need to be creating a, a leadership team that's resilient and able to look at every single one of these supposed crises that come along and go, okay, another problem, but we know how to deal with this. We will get through it.

And when we move from, oh my God, it's another crisis to another thing, let's get into it. That's a shift. Right? And the tone shifts and the response shifts from a panic reaction and business continuity planning and emergency response meetings to, okay. Another thing that is complex and ambiguous and difficult to deal with is a volatile situation.

And we haven't talked about it in the book, but we do talk about it in our, in our program, but essentially, how do we move people from feeling vulnerable, uncertain, concerned, and anxious to having vision, understanding, clarity and agility. And part of that is moving from a scarcity to an abundant mindset.

 Let's go to connection. Improve the connection between people. First.

I love already that I have a zero idea in details what's in instead of that, but I agree already with that statement. Give me a little bit more about it.

When I was writing the book, and I, I know I've read it so many times now obviously, and it's a great book, so everybody should read it, but you know, no, I'm, I'm joking the. The concept that often surprises people, but when you say it, they're like, oh, yeah, that's pretty obvious.

Is we're essentially grownup monkeys or grownup cavemen. And I don't mean that in a demeaning way at all. I mean that in a, in an evolutionary term, but essentially, you know, we rely on tribalism to create a sense of safety, to create a sense of belonging, to fuel our identity, and to be something that we're making an impact for.

So, you know, if you think about it from a, let's go back in time, a few hundred thousand years caveman. If you were the lone wolf versus the member of the tribe, you were far more likely to go hungry, to be at risk from predators to be left in the cold and to not have the firewood that you needed to keep warm.

If you were part of the tribe, you had somebody to watch you back. You had some friends, you had some people to tell stories with you had somebody to watch out for the sabertooth tiger that might come along and things were a lot better. You fast forward those couple hundred thousand years, our brains are essentially exactly the same.

We just have a different context now. We have a boardroom, not a cave, and our tribal mechanics that work on in our brain. So the things that trigger us or, and put us into a scarcity or an abundant mindset are exactly the same. So when, what we talk about in the book is welcoming new people to the organization.

How do you onboard them effectively so they feel part of your tribe and how do you keep 'em safe? And then the second piece of connecting people is creating networks. So it's building your tribe. And whether that is. Your internal cultural tribe, or whether it's your stakeholder relations tribe, the concepts are the same.

You have to go and connect people first. So the role of a leader is twofold. It's onboarding and networking.

Yeah. It sounds so simple when you say that.

Sounds, it's all super obvious. Right? And this is the thing I found fascinating when I wrote the book. I was like, this all sounds really obvious. Is anybody gonna be interested in this? But when you, when you explain it to people, like, oh yeah, oh, it makes sense. And, and that I guess is, you know, is, is my job is to, we, I call it turning light bulbs on in people's heads.

You know, the stuff is already there. We're just lighting it differently and showing a different view. And so often it's, it is a case of putting it into people's heads in a way. They go, oh yeah. And then they can start to make a change.

Yeah. Le linking this to, to burnout. So what is the limiting factor of burnout when you are in that situation or when you are in the connection chapter?

Yeah. So for connection, if I feel isolated and alone, I'm not part of the tribe. I feel vulnerable. So if you look at it in terms of the framework, every chapter builds on the previous chapters. So we always start with purpose, then we focus on the abundant mindset, then we focus on connection.

So if I'm not connected, I'm in a fearful place because I'm isolated and alone. And this isn't whether you're introverted or extroverted. And we talk about that in the book. This is about do I feel safe? Do I feel psychologically safe? Am I physically safe? Because I've got some people who are watching my back.

 If I don't have those connections, then it's very hard to be abundant and it's very hard to live up to my purpose. So you can see how they start to Russian dull sequence together. The other piece of connection or the other elements of connection chapter are around connecting people with the plan and connecting people with development.

So again, the negative side of that is if I'm not feeling part of the tribe, I feel isolated. I feel scared. If I'm not connected with the plan, I'm not clear how do I make an impact? How do I know what I'm making an impact awards, how do I live my purpose? I feel scared and I feel worried, and I might get fired.

And this is terrible situation to be in. So again, we wanna connect people with the plan and we talk about connecting their heads and their hearts. So yes I intelligently get this, but I'm not really bought into it. It's not aligned with my purpose. So we need to connect their purpose to the plan and then connect 'em with the development.

And this is, Essentially, how do we help people learn and grow into better performance by developing them? And so we want to connect people with opportunities and the chance to grow their network, to explore new things, to increase their experience. And the opposite of that is you join a company, nobody invests in you, you don't get onboarded.

You don't know what you're doing. How can you be a high performing culture if your people don't get training? If you, you know, the only training they do is they get to go on a conference once a year, or they get to go on a course once a year for a day. That's not creating connection, that's not connecting them with development at all.

So we, we want to show leaders, again, tangible, physical things they can do and how that works at a neuropsychological, physiological and a operational level.

I love that because like you said it's logic if you read it, if you hear it, but it's still not happening. I see it as well when we talk about innovating in organizations, that spending the two minutes having a coffee with someone. That might be one of the key stakeholders in the future, but not right now, is giving you so much opportunities to get to know them in a better way.

And that connection will make you more successful in the future. If we take this as an organization, what I see from an innovation perspective, a lot of organization are not doing it intentionally. And I think that's where organizations and leadership teams need to get to. Doing this intentionally and then throughout the organization, not just, yeah, it happened by accident that we connected in this way and that we put this two people to together.

A hundred percent and. I think you've hit a real nail on the head that we see in every walk of life, but particularly applies in the corporate organization. You know, the every walk of life pieces. We all know we should eat healthy exercise, well sleep well, not drink alcohol, not take drugs you know, eat our vegetables five a day, whatever it might be.

But how many of us, you know, drink too much wine, skip that workout, have a McDonald's on the way home because we've worked late, or, you know, fast food, whatever it might be. Not, not endorsing any brands in particular. And so it's that I know I should do it, but I don't do it. And what we try to lay out in the book is, Hey, you might know all these things.

Here's how you do those things to make them super easy and, and, and logical. And, you know, everything we offer in the book is based on actually extract from. The ways of working program that, that we run with clients and all of it is around like, here's a one page guide, or here's a template, or here's a conversation tool, or it's a very simple, oh yeah, I can do that.

I, I, I understand it now and I can do it. So I'm far more likely to do it when it's not scary, because again, go back to the scarcity mindset. If it's too hard or too scary, or I perceive it's gonna take too long, I won't do it. Whereas if it's confident, easy and logical, I will do, my chances are much higher.

Yeah, absolutely. So exploration,

Hmm.

tell us about the exploration and leading us from exploration and curiosity to are you an overworked employee and employee over worker?

Yeah.

Get us into

It's probably my favorite chapter in the whole book actually. And I think because. I've always been like a crazy chemist. The first book I wrote that unfortunately I forgot to publish, forgot, just never did publish, was called The Curious Chemist. And it, you know, imagine those alchemists back in, you know, the medieval times and they would sit in their basements and they would mix things together and the goal was to make gold, right?

They would always be trying to make gold, but you know, they might make purple smoke or brown sludge or nothing. But they tried and they kept trying. And what they would do is they would note down all the little things that they learned along the way. And what we want is our leaders to be doing the same thing.

We want them to be trying new things and encouraging their teams to try new things like these medieval alchemists. And it's not always gonna go well, but every time it doesn't go well, you learn something. So in my, in, in our vernacular, there's no such thing as a failure. There's either a win or a lesson. And so the exploration chapter is really coming at that from a few different angles. First of all, we talk about what is exploration and why is that important? And there's some fascinating research around the concept of innovation design thinking. We brought in a whole lot of stuff and we distilled it down into this chapter, so we talk about what is exploration, how does that work?

The second section of the chapter is what we call a curiosity curve, and this is something that we built a few years ago based on some research by a guy called Dan Cashton, and he has this fascinating research paper into the five elements of curiosity. And I remember reading the paper and being really struck by some of the, some of the drivers that are in there.

But essentially what we discovered was the organizations that explore and are curious significantly outperform. Organizations that don't. And, and, and look at it in the most logical, you know, simple example, and this isn't in the book but the concept of blockbuster video and they didn't explore and they are now out of business because they had the opportunity to explore online streaming.

And they were like, that's never gonna work. Look at the example of cameras Kodak. Oh no, no, no. We're not gonna do digital. We're gonna stick with the purest film. We're not gonna explore that. And who has a film camera anymore? No, no. We're probably less than 1% of the world has a film camera anymore.

So what the curiosity curve section does is it unpacks the four different levels of curiosity that organizations can look at from being really certain. So like we're not doing anything different. We're not exploring anything different until we're a hundred percent certain, which means basically nothing ever changes.

Then we have the cautious organizations. So dip a toe in the water but don't really commit. And if we don't really commit, the risk is not too high. So that's where we see a lot of organizations sitting. The next phase is the, what we call the optimal zone in the curve where you are maximizing opportunity by being curious.

So it's like a medium to high appetite, to be curious and to explore new things. And then there's obviously too much of anything is a bad thing. We have the chaos zone, which is where let's just explore everything all at the same time and see what happens. And unfortunately, that leads to burnout.

Because people are torn in too many different directions. And if we go back to that, what we talked about in chapter one, purpose, the purpose is not clear at that point because we're not really sure what we're doing. And there's an example of, of JC Penney in the book who they tried to change everything at the same time and they didn't know what was working, what wasn't working, and what was what, which bits were making a difference. So that's all the positive stuff, right? That's the graphical equalizer above zero. The third section of the chapter is the overworked or over worker. And it was interesting because the negative version of exploration is exploitation. But when we use the word exploitation, it can be quite triggering to boardrooms because it brings up visions of, you know, third world sweatshops.

And that was uncomfortable for people. So we used the word overwork instead. And so this section of the chapter really talks about the, the things that leaders might be doing that are exploiting with the best pro, the best possible version of that word, their staff. And so there's some examples in there of organizations that have potentially been accused of doing that and how and why they were doing it.

And then it unpacks the multiple reasons the six reasons that leaders can often create burnout. Sometimes inadvertently. And, and this, this one is more of an awareness build. It's what are the six things that you might be doing to your team or that you might be experiencing yourself from your boss that are blocking your exploration and actually leading to exploitation. And so we call it overwork or over workers.

It's quite fascinating that again, the connection with the other chapters where if you are living in this cas that is linked because you are. You're in a scarcity mindset or set up scene and people are not connected and that's why there is chaos. What I see is still quite a lot of organizations who are in chaos because, like you said, because of Covid Pandemic, all the other changes, artificial intelligence, there's something happening every week literally in our world where either you want to be on top of everything or you don't have a purpose and you're not really sure where you're driving.

So that's there. I see a lot of connections. I think it's, it's so important to get leaders and organization understanding the connections between the chapters as well, not just see reading one and then, yeah, I get that point, but how this connects throughout is fascinating.

You are exactly right jens, it just turned out actually that it worked in terms of a word, but the architecture of the chapters was very deliberate in the way that they were put together in the sequence they were. That'll come to light and as we talk about downtime but the, you are right.

You know, there's, there's two ways of looking at this. Current circumstance, there's the, we're very clear on what we've got to do, and all of us are lined up against that. We know we can cope. We're working together, we're growing together, we're connected together, and we're gonna work to find some new ways to overcome these new circumstances.

That's the high performing culture version, right? Or you get what we also see in organizations at the moment, which is, oh my God, there's a new thing. It's really scary. We're not really clear on how we're gonna do anything, so we're gonna be very reactive. It's terrifying. We're all gonna lose our jobs.

The company's gonna go outta business. We're gonna go bust. We're gonna have to lay people off. We've gotta have to cut costs. I wish those people would just work harder and do stuff, but they're so unskilled. Most important thing we can do is get back to basics and just knuckle down and do what we know works.

And you can, you see that? And, and these are two, like obviously polar opposite examples, and everybody sits somewhere on that spectrum. But we see this in reality in organizations day in, day out, that everybody sits somewhere on that scale. And I've described say two extremes, but they're not unreasonable extremes that don't exist.

They're, they are realities. And I've worked in organizations supporting the leadership teams that are doing both of those things. And it's fascinating as a consultant, a business advisor to have the luxury of that visibility and that perspective, and then being able to share that back with organizations and say, Hey, this is what I'm seeing and maybe we can do something to help you.

Yeah, let's go to downtime. 

Yes. 

Downtime is the one where, at least for me, at when I've seen the outline of the book. Yeah, that's the obvious one. You need to have downtime and it's very important for you to build high performance, but I guess it's not that obvious, or maybe it is.

Tell us about it.

You're completely right. It is, it's a hundred percent obvious. And it's normally the one that people go to first, which is why we left it till last. The, you know, look at it the most, the most basic example. I'm tired. I'm gonna take the day off. I'm exhausted. I'm gonna go on vacation. And that sounds really sensible.

The challenge in downtime is if you take that vacation to recharge your batteries and you come back into a dysfunctional organization that has no purpose, has no abundance, has no connection, has no exploration, it's like trying to build a house on a shaky foundation, the thing's gonna fall over again and.

This was my personal experience in 2017. I took a couple of weeks off before I left the organization I was working with to try and kind of do a bit of a reset and regain. And then I came back and it was just the same. And so all of the gains that I had achieved through that vacation were undone within days.

And so what we talk about in downtime is what does good downtime look like? Why is it so important? And there's lots of beliefs around downtime and people often have a unhealthy way of recharging their batteries. The chapter talks about people who maybe are using alcohol as a coping mechanism.

You know, I can only relax if I have a drink. Maybe they're using comfort food and fast food takeaways as, as a, a method of downtime. And there's a fascinating delineation between the hemispheres of the brain that we operate in, are we predominant left brain, predominantly right brain.

And so finding a downtime activity that is in the opposite hemisphere. We also unpack in some of the neuroscience, the two different networks that operate in the brain. And if you imagine the two networks as being kinda like two TV channels you can watch one channel or the other channel, but you can't watch both at the same time.

And so downtime is switching channels from what we call the task process network, the tpn, which is the sort of action focused problem solving, deep thinking cerebral activity that our brain is involved in to the default mode network, the D M N, which is essentially the. Daydreaming, meditating, mindfulness, standing in the shower moment, and to create effectively, to be able to switch between them.

You cannot be in T p N all the time. You have to be in DM n some of the time. And there's, I mean, there's so much r around. The best ideas come when you're out for a run. You're in the shower, you're washing, doing the washing up. When the subconscious works on it, you know, people that offer don't think about it for a while.

I, I could solve that problem. Well, there's a reason for that. And so we, we talk about that. And then the final section of the downtown is focused on spotting the need for downtime in your team. 

Often as a leader, when we are in it, it can be very hard to. To see what's going on for those people around us. We can be very, very hard to spot the burnout that is happening in the team. we wanna give some signs and symptoms that people can pay attention to and look out for that are hopefully gonna help. 

So the third section in the downtime chapter is, I guess again, it's the helping leaders see what might be right in front of them, but they might not necessarily be paying attention to, because if they're burning out, if they're in a dysfunctional organization, if they want to build a high performance culture, but they're struggling to work out what's required, sometimes we can be a bit narrow in terms of our perspective.

And so we talk through an example of a Korean business that I worked with, that there was a specific employee who had gone from kind of individual, high performer to really struggling and really burning out for a variety of reasons. And we use that story to illustrate the need as a leader to start paying attention to what's going on in your team.

Are. They struggling, are you potentially contributing to that? And, you know, if we go back through the chapters is there a lack of purpose? Is there a lack of abundance? Is there a lack of connection? Is there a lack of exploration? Is there exploitation? And paying attention to your role and responsibility in potentially moving that downtime from a nice to have to an absolute must have.

It also talks through what that might look like in terms of a rehabilitation plan for employees that are struggling with burnout and what might be made available to those employees. Because again, cool, I'm burned out. What do I do about it? I'll just take some time off. Well, actually yes, that's part of the solution, but there's, there's significantly more that can be done as a leader and that can be done by organizations in support of their populations and all of the stuff that we suggest we've done and had experience of supporting in organizations.

But it has to come from the organizational desire and purpose first is like actually we recognize that our staff are burning out. We recognize that we need to support them, and we recognize that we have to make some changes using all of the PACED model, but also having some human compassion and some human connection.

So connect people first the concept is how do we actually do that? So yeah, that's downtime chapter. We deliberately left it till last because you have to do the other things first. We deliberately sequence, the five chapters in the way we did because they do work in a, like an a nesting doll arrangement.

And we do think that downtime is important, but it's the cream on the cake, not the solution.

 I, I think like you said already for me, there are three layers of that is one part is a responsibility of the organization. That's then as well implying that's responsibility of the leaders to do that for themselves. But as well for the team members, understanding when people are getting over the edge and what is the reason for that.

And going back to connections, having the discussion with the team, where are we with this? Having check-ins, not just on business topics, which every organization does, but as well on this topics, how do you feel? What's going on? What's going on in your private life? Because sometimes, at least what I've heard, there are triggers in your private life that might get you the last step over the edge.

Not the organizational things, but the organizations are very, very important part of that as well.

Oh you're so right, you know? I remember being a GM in an organization and I was almost two different people. I was the home Jimmy and the work Jimmy, and it was Jimmy and James actually. And when James was at work, you know, he was a hard ass and very driven and very motivated when he was at home, it's like, I'm super chill and like watching TV and not doing a lot and I think people found a bit of a contrast.

And I wish that I could have brought all of myself to work because I think part of that tension, it gets back to my personal purpose, right? My personal purpose and my role purpose were not aligned. So I had this dissonance going on, but nobody ever checked in with me about my home life. Nobody ever checked in with me about what I cared about doing or my hobbies or my passions.

I had three leaders in 18 months three different executives in 18 months who were all also burning out as they were trying to do significant stuff. So they didn't have the perspective to check in with me or the time to check in with me. And I certainly don't know. It's not a, it's not a sob story. I certainly don't think I was alone in, in that.

I think there's an awful lot of people in organizations who just don't have the time to check in with their team. And so, and, and it again, because it's hard because they don't really know how to approach it. It's just a long one hour whip meeting versus a, Hey, let's go grab a coffee and just, how's things in the family?

How's things in the job? How are you feeling about life? Like we can, we can have very basic human conversations. And going back to the tribal model, the whole idea of we're not our job. We're a person first, and then we have a role. So it's going back to the human connection of how do I connect with you as a person and then we can build on that and high performance actually comes from people.

It's amazing. You wouldn't believe it, but it's from people.

 I can't agree more at. I, I'm really looking forward in reading the whole book. So Beat Burnout is the book, when does it go out? When is it available? Where is it available? Where can people find more about it?

So we've got a a really exciting launch plan, which kicks off in the second week of April. So we're gonna be launching reasonably soon. I think in the next week or two we'll be launching the wait list for the book. The wait list also gives people access to the first chapter as a, an advanced copy.

So all you need to do is go to jimmy burs.com/book. You can access the wait list there. You can download a copy of the first chapter to keep you occupied for the next couple of weeks while we do all the rest. The book will be available on Amazon. It, we are in the process of getting it uploaded to Apple Books.

Then we'll be going to a print run and then finally we'll be getting the audio book version done. We're having some really exciting time playing with AI book readers versus voiceovers and whether I may even end up reading it myself. I'm, cause I love reading it, so it's, it's exciting to to read.

So yeah, anything between now and between, sorry, between second week of April and July is the graduated roll up program.

I will put the links into the show notes. As always. You can of course reach out to Jimmy directly over his website, over LinkedIn maybe as well if someone is interested asking questions about this topics, getting some tips. Jimmy, did we forget anything?

The action points. We promised.

We have to talk about the action points Yes. And the what's next.

Oh, yes. So let's start with what's next and then go into the action points.

Absolutely. So in, in terms of the what's next, the whole concept of the book is it's meant to be the leader's playbook. And a playbook is really good if you use it. It's not so good if you buy it and put it on a shelf or buy it and leave it inside your Kindle app. So, in terms of the, what's next for people who are interested is, Reads the chapters and take, and we're gonna talk about the action tips, but take the action tips and actually try them out and be brave.

Explore having a go. And you might graze your knees. It might be clunky, it might be uncomfortable, but all of the things that we suggest in the book have all been done multiple times by multiple leaders in multiple organizations and have made significant differences. And we shared some statistics at the start of the book around some of the shifts that we've seen organizations make.

But the what's next is obviously go grab the book. We encourage you. But more importantly, use the book. Use it as a guide, use it as a playbook, and use it to support you to have a go at doing some of the things that are gonna help you as a leader create a high performing culture.

So action points.

Action

how do I find out? So I'm super interested in the one which, how do I find my own purpose?

Yeah, every section has action tips. And there's normally between, oh, I think between like five and 20 per chapter. The purpose one I agree with you. You know, let's start with purpose and let's find our own purpose to get the ball rolling.

Because, you know, you might find out that actually you as a leader are in cognitive dissonance and you aren't aligned to what you want to be doing in life. And so you could spend a lot of time and energy burning yourself out trying to create a high performing culture in some way. You don't wanna be. So let's first of all, affirm your commitment to your organization and your role, and your inner driving force, your inner why.

Let's line those up. So the way to start doing that, and, and this is described in detail in the book, but essentially it's to start thinking about what are your values? What are those experiences that you went through that. Made you feel like you needed to make a difference to that part of the world?

And what are the really positive value examples that you treasure from your formative years that again, make you who you are and define the reason why you are on this planet. So you're looking for values, beliefs, experiences, and priorities. Think about what matters the most to you and what you stand for and the difference you're trying to make in the world.

That'd be where I'd recommend everybody starts, and that's literally the first action tip in the book.

Yeah. Love it. It, I think it's so, so, so important. Anyone listen to this. If you have found your purpose through this action point, let us know. We would be super pleased and eager to learn. How did you do that? And just contact us wherever you are connected to us, either in the comments, if you see it on YouTube, if you see it on social media, just let us know on social media or hit us up over our website.

So we really would love to hear about. How you used this action point in finding your own purpose as a starting point. Jimmy, I'm really looking forward to read the book. I have the chapter number one already. I'm not sure if that's the final one, but I guess it is. So

Yeah, it is. Yeah. I've, I've, I've been ordered to stop editing when is enough, enough, never. But no, we are very committed to getting this available to people and getting it into people's hands so they can start making a difference. So I'm sure there'll be a second edition and third edition in subsequent years.

And I guess like everything in, in this world, as the world changes, the responses need to change. And so we'll update the book, but for now, it will be available, I promise.

yeah, so looking forward, thank you Jimmy, for spending your Saturday morning with me. Really looking forward to the book as I said. Thank you very much.