 How do you avoid burnout as a house cleaner? Oh, that is a great question, and we're going to talk about that today. Hi there, I'm Angela Brown, and this is Ask a House Cleaner. This is a show where you get to ask a house cleaning question, and I get to help you find an answer. Now, today's show is brought to us by HouseCleaning360.com. If you find yourself in burnout mode, you can send your customers over to HouseCleaning360.com so they can hire a replacement for you, and you can get out of the business. No, I'm just kidding. HouseCleaning360.com, it's a network hub that connects house cleaners with homeowners. So if you need a house cleaner, HouseCleaning360.com. All right, on to today's show, which is from a house cleaner that's been in the business for four years, and she's reaching burnout, and she's super stressed, and she wants to know, what do I do differently than everything that I've done in the past? All right, the very first thing that I have to ask you, it's kind of a heart-to-heart question, but I have to ask you, why are you doing this? Why are you in the house cleaning business? Why did you choose house cleaning when you could have chose working at a fast food restaurant or waiting tables? What was it about house cleaning that sucked you in? Okay, now that you know your reason why, that's got to motivate you every single day. Now, the reason my why was because it paid my bills, and I loved the flexibility so that I could do other things around my schedule. If I needed to change my schedule a little bit, I had the flexibility. I did not have to go back to a boss and put in three weeks in advance for some time off, and then I didn't have to worry about being written up for me not being available on a certain day. I loved the flexibility of working for myself, and I loved the money and the income it could provide me to pay my bills and be a responsible adult. What are your reasons why? That's number one on our list of five easy ways to avoid burnout. Remind yourself every day of your reason why. All right, then the second thing is, I need for you to make a note in your mind about what your house cleaning does for you. For example, split it up in terms of payments. So Mrs. Jones pays for your car payment. Mrs. Peterson pays for your rent or your mortgage. Mrs. Palmer pays for your rent or your mortgage, and you break it up into however many clients or however many customers and what your bills pay. This customer pays my electric bill. This customer pays for my groceries. This one pays for my education. This one pays for child support. This one pays for alimony, whatever it is. So break down all your bills and then assign a bill to each client. Because then when you go to the customer's house, and this is just a fun game I play with myself, well, I can't not go to Mrs. Peterson's house, although I'm not fond of Mrs. Peterson right now, because we all go in and out of phases of liking and hating our customers, right? They do the same with us. But you can't not go to her house because she's your sewer bill. They're going to cut off the sewer if you don't go to Mrs. Peterson's house. Or they're going to take your car away if you don't make the car payment, which means you have to go to Mrs. Palmer's house or whatever it is. So by assigning a specific bill to each of your customers, it gives you incentive to like, ugh, I don't want to give up that bill or I don't want to give up that service that I'm paying for, therefore I must go to the customer's house. So it kind of rejuvenates you to go, ugh, okay, it's two and a half hours. I can suck it up because I really want this vacation that I'm saving for and this customer pays for my vacation. And so that keeps you kind of going on days when you're reaching the burnout mode. Now when you reach burnout mode, it's really important to take care of yourself. And as house cleaners sometimes, I know lots of house cleaners that have gone 7, 12, 15 years, and no vacations. And so if you are not able to take a vacation, you can take a mini vacation. And the mini vacation is a conscious thing inside your head where you say, okay, right now I'm on vacation. For example, every single time I get inside my car and I'm driving somewhere, I say to myself I'm now on vacation, right? The outside world just disappeared, I'm in this little hub of my car. I can listen to whatever I want. It can be a podcast, it can be music, or I can be silent. My body, my physical body is sitting here. There's no physical activity required, I just drive and stay awake, right? So my physical body is completely relaxed. It's completely at ease and it's rejuvenating itself while I'm having this little mini rest of a vacation. And it's so awesome because then when I get wherever it is I'm going, my mind is reinvigorated and my body is reinvigorated and I just had this little 20 minute vacation of driving from point A to point B. And when I get there I'm like, hello, I'm all ready to go again, right? But it has to be a conscious effort because if you just plop down in the seat of your car and you're just aimlessly driving, when you arrive you're not consciously aware that you're now reinvigorated. So you have to take conscious mini vacations. Now there are years that I've traveled and I've done a lot of consulting and training and what have you, and I will find myself in a strange city with a rental car. And I have two hours between appointments and I'm like, boo-yah, mini vacation. And I'll go sightseeing, I'll go to see maybe a museum or some kind of an event or some historical place or a landmark. And I will just make a note and then cross it off my bucket list like, hey, I only had two hours but I just went and I saw the St. Louis Arch. Yay! You know, bucket list. So you can enjoy the time that you have but you have to take it consciously because nobody is going to give it to you and if you don't take the mini vacations everything kind of bleeds together and that just only aggravates the burnout. All right? Then the next tip that I would recommend five ways to avoid burnout is every year come up with something new. It can be a new hobby, it can be a new skill, it can be a new language, it doesn't matter what it is but spend the whole year and master that. And it's really cool because what happens is then you have your regular job, which is your cleaning and that's just a means to an end that pays your bills. And the focus and the fascination goes to this other thing. So instead of only having house cleaning and you just get up every day and you go through the drudgery of it all and you just are paying the bills and it's awful suddenly you're like, hey, I've learned 342 words this week in Spanish. I get to go home and I can learn 10 more today. Maybe I can learn 15 and it just adds some excitement, it adds something new. I know one year I took up acting and it was so much fun. I did the house cleaning, it's the same old, same old, same old thing and then over here I was going to auditions and I was going to classes and I was meeting casting directors and I was learning about film and it was just something fun and interesting to keep my mind occupied while I was going through the motions. And my suggestion is while you're cleaning you can be learning podcasts about whatever it is. I know this last year the focus for me was learning search engine optimization and you're like, if that's a business thing. Yeah, it is a business thing, but guess what happened? What happened was as I started learning and implementing the stuff and the business is still going on. It's the day-to-day stuff happening and then I'm thinking, wait a second, maybe there's a different keyword I could use and there are little things that will pop out at you that keep your interest going, even though you're going through all the motions of the business. So every year, learn something new. There's nobody that's going to stop you from learning. We live in the information age and there are so many YouTube videos and they're free and there are podcasts you can listen to and they're free. All you have to do is just commit to learning and then apply what you've learned and this is one of the quickest things to beat the doldrums of burnout. All right, then the last one that I want to mention to you and this is probably the most important. Being a business owner is a marathon. It's not a sprint and if you've ever done a marathon, a regular marathon is 26.2 miles and it's the last two miles that are going to kill you. It's the first point two and the last point two that will kill you. It's the getting started and then it's the last two because you're so close to the end. But everything in between is a pacing game and as a sprint, you just go all out, right? But you burn out really quickly unless you have a plan or unless there's a formula. So there must be pacing and if you are strategic about the marathons that you run and in this scenario, I'm talking about business. In a marathon, you have to budget your fuel and you have to budget your energy and if you start feeling really great at a particular moment, you have to take advantage of that. And if you feel really horrible at a particular moment, you have to honor that and you have to say just one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, just stay focused. And there are moments in running a marathon that you are burned out, but you know the end game and so you pace yourself so that you are available for that last point two miles to do a kick in and race it through the finish line, right? So this is a marathon, it's a long-term game. It's not a short sprint because if you short sprint through the house cleaning business, you're going to be onto something else in 30 days. But if you're here for the long haul, it's a pacing game and you can't burn yourself out too quickly because you still want to be here next year, 10 years from now, 20 years from now and you want this to be your career because it's a very lucrative career if you can figure out how to pace yourself. So pace yourself and give yourself the breaks that you need and realize that you are your biggest asset. I've said this, if I've said it once, I've said it a million times and I mean it. You have to take care of your physical health and that means your back, your neck, your knees, your arms. There's a lot of movement, there's a lot of body breakdown and feeding yourself crap is not going to help you out. You need healthy food, you need plenty of sleep at night and you need to take care of yourself. Along with that, I'm going to throw one other thing in and that's your mental health. You need to be listening to things that are positive and upbeat, that inspire you and motivate you and having that other new hobby a year, whatever it might be, the new language or whatever, that will motivate you to keep learning while you're earning. So that is what I would recommend, those are five surefire techniques that will keep you from being burned out. All right, if you found this helpful, please pass it on to a friend. We're all here to help each other, you never know who you can help by passing it on and until we meet again, leave the world a cleaner place than when you found it.