 Welcome everybody to another episode of the non-profit show. We have one of our favorite guests returning, Anthony A. Dix Jr. He's going to be talking to us about overcoming the burnout barrier. This is going to be really fun because I think a lot of times we're just like, oh burnt out, got to go next. I think what you're going to do is you're going to help us understand how we don't have to get to that point where we just have to walk away, where we can start to recognize what's going on with ourselves and our team. So this is going to be really, really important. I know so many of us, Anthony, at the beginning of the year, really say, okay, we're not going to get burnt out. We're going to watch ourselves. We're going to watch our team. March 1st is on Friday. And I bet there are a lot of people that are like, I'm done, right? You know, they fried. So if we haven't met before, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. Jared Ransom, the nonprofit nerd, has the day off. We have amazing partners that join us day in and day out. They include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Nonprofit Thought Leader, Staff and Boutique, Your Part-Time Controller, 180 Management Group, Fundraising Academy at National University, JMT Consulting, Nonprofit Nerd, and Nonprofit Tech Talk. And if you've missed any of our nearly 1,000 episodes, you can find us on our app. We're also on streaming broadcast platforms, and of course on podcast. Okay, Anthony A. Dix Jr., you're back. We're super excited to have you from 180 Management Group. Anthony, tell us a little bit before we dig deep what 180 Management Group does. Well, first and foremost, Julia, thank you so much for having me on again. It warms my heart to hear the word favorite in my name connected to each other with regards to this podcast. So that's dope. So I appreciate that. But to tell you a little bit more about 180 Management Group, 180 Management Group is a management consulting firm that serves specifically at this stage nonprofits. And we specialize in organizational transformation through operations, leadership, and strategic planning. And so an organization will call upon us to help transform it, to walk it through some change management, so that they can get back to doing what they do best. And that's accomplishing missions. So that's a little bit more about 180 Management Group. Now you're located in the east, correct? Yes, we are on the east coast, not the west coast. That's the best coast. As they say, we're on the east coast. We are currently headquartered in Annapolis, Maryland. But we serve organizations all over the nation. And we've got some team members all over the nation. I think we may have even added an international team member recently. So yeah, we've got a few good things going on. And again, I'm just happy to be here with you. Well, I'm thrilled you're here because I find you're... We've also had Miriam Dixon riveting woman, super full of energy and can-do spirit. I think the thing that I've really enjoyed with the two of you is that you've given very realistic achievable things for us to do in regards to making change or seeking a different path. And so let's get into it because this is like... I'm like, what? There's good news about burnout. Okay. What does that look like? So it's pretty simple. The good news about burnout is... Well, I could do it a few ways. One, I'll say it like this. If you have experienced burnout, you probably are an exceptional leader. This is what I mean by that. Most people don't get to the point of burnout. Burnout and what's the good news about it is that when you reach that point of burnout, you have become one of the few people on the planet who have actually reached their full potential and have maximized their capacity. Not everybody does that. Not everybody gets to a point where they say, you know what? I can't do much of anything else. I've reached my limit. I've reached my capacity. I've got to do something different. And that within itself, to me, is good news. Because when you are a high performer, when you are someone who wants to get a lot of things accomplished, you have a tendency to think that you can do just about anything. Right? You think you're invincible, and you don't think that tiredness or fatigue is inevitable. But if you are working and working appropriately, not just inefficiently, because sometimes you can reach burnout by doing things inefficiently. But if you've been efficient, you can still maximize your capacity and understanding that is good news, because if you have reached your capacity, then that means you still have an opportunity to grow and do some more. And you don't find that out off times until you've reached your energy's end or your wit's end. The good news is you're an exceptional leader. You know, it's really interesting because I think of this as like so many people think that this is a threshold of failure. That they're like, I have failed because I burnt out. And then there's like, there's no, it doesn't seem like there's a correction. It just seems like people have to leave or they have to walk away. That there's self-preservation in this, or I don't know, but that it doesn't seem to be something that we explore as a positive, right? Did that make sense? Exactly. That makes perfect sense. That makes perfect sense. Sometimes when people reach a dead end professionally, they emphasize the dead more than the end. There's a way to start after something is ended, but if you focus more on the dead than you do the end, there's like, there's almost no way to come back from that. So focusing on the positive of burnout, not necessarily the negative symptoms that you may experience, but the fact that you have reached your capacity and that there are opportunities for you to learn from how you got to that point and leverage it so that you can manage your capacity and energy different so that you may in the future avoid burnout. You don't have to get to a stage of burnout, but sometimes the only way to learn how to manage your energy is by reaching that burnout barrier. And it is something that can be positive if you leverage it appropriately. You just got to leverage it appropriately. So let's talk about that then a little bit more deeply because I'm really interested in that sense of compromising your capacity and understanding your capacity. What are some of those tools that will help us to recognize that path that we're on so that we don't get to that complete and utter, like I got to shut it down level? Yep, that's a very good question. So think about it this way. If you are traveling a distance in any type of transportation vehicle, whether it's a plane, a train, an automobile, and I don't mean to sound like the movie, but... plane, train, automobile, each one of those vehicles have instruments to measure the capacity of the vehicle with regards to whether or not it's going to make it to its destination and what condition it will be in when it makes it to that destination. You've got oil pressure. You've got RPMs. You've got battery gauges for the electricity. You've got measurements for how the hydraulics are running, how the temperature of the transmission fluid is flowing through the car. You've got all of these different things that are being measured so that the driver may be aware of the vehicle's capacity so that they know how hard they can push it, how long they can do that, how long they can drive it hard or fast or whatever the case may be, how good are the brakes? They've tested these things out. And the challenge, though, for us professionally is we often don't take the same energy in investing in those type of instruments for ourselves. Now, we're getting a little bit more with technology with wearables and something to take your heart rate and stuff like that, but I think the major thing that has to be upgraded for many of us is our mindset about what it looks like for us to be operating at our ideal performance state. Interesting. What does it look like for me to be hitting on all cylinders? And there's a wonderful article that came out, I think, in January 2001, Harvard Business Review, talking about the corporate athlete. And when I was reading this, Julia, it dawned on me. You'd never really hear athletes complain about burnout. No, that's really a good comment. No, you hear about systematic failure with an organ or something, like a joint. But yeah, you don't use the word burnout. Nope. They keep going and going and going. And one of the observations that the authors of this article lifted was, and it's really, really interesting, how athletes practice for more, they train more than they compete. So football, basketball, for example, they've got so many hours worth of practice and then they might play the game for two to four hours. But the other days of the week, they are practicing, practicing, practicing. On the opposite side, professionals spend less time in training and more time performing. Okay. And exactly, like, oh, wow. And this is the other thing, Julie. They said that most athletes do that for 10 to 15 years. Right, right. Where professionals are operating like they are for 30, 40 and even 50 years. Yeah, yeah. Because we don't understand the rhythm, as they allude to, the rhythm of how we work and how when it comes to operating at your ideal performance state, they say that it's one, not all mental, because when we think about increasing our capacity, usually as professionals working in a knowledge worker, you're working in that space, you're thinking about, well, if I'm going to increase my capacity, I'm a knowledge worker, so I might as well just increase my knowledge. It was about my mind. They say, no, it's not just about your mind. They give this pyramid of, at the foundation is your physical body. Then it's your emotions. Then your mind, your mental capacity, and then your spiritual capacity as well. And they say in order for you to operate at your ideal performance state, you've got to maximize all of that. And this is the kicker, just with this particular order in these studies. They say that performance for the human being is not linear. You don't get up and just keep performing at a high level, keep performing at a high level, keep performing at a high level, keep performing at every, no, they say that the enemy of poor performance is not stress. Is linearity. Yeah. See, if you're going to perform well, there are oscillations. You got to have peak performance, but you got to come off that peak and come down, have down time. That's almost a graphical illustration of, oh, I'm at my peak, but if I'm going to perform at my peak for two hours, I need to come off that peak and have some real downtime. And they suggest developing rituals to manage your energy from ups, downs, to get up and down, to get up and to get down. Donald Miller, he had a, has a production framework. And one of the things about it that I love is that in it, he programs where there are parts of the day where you know that I don't have as much mental energy as I had at other parts of the day. At another time. Right, right. You got brain drain. Yeah. And so the authors of this particular article suggest you need rituals so that you can manage your energy so that when you're in those down times, you maximize those down times because the downtime is actually refueling other parts of your performance state so that you can continue to perform. It's just that many professionals, we don't have those tools. We don't have that dashboard for our capacity and performance. We've got it for our organization. We've got it for our department. We just don't have it for our performance. And I think the onus is on us as professionals to develop those things, to learn ourselves and to know ourselves and to be advocates for our physical health, our emotional health, our mental health, and our spiritual health because there's your whole self doing the work. It's not like somebody cut your brain out and you just take your brain to work, no. The body is the source of energy. So if you're not eating appropriately, working out appropriately, if you're not giving your body times of rest or putting a certain amount of stress on your body as these authors advocate, stress on the body can ease the mind if you're doing it in an exercise context. Right, right. Right? Yeah. So those are some of the systems and tools that help developing your own personal capacity dashboard. You can use it. The doctor has one with the blood pressure, your vitals and the vitamins. They have one. Maybe you need one too. It's such a fascinating concept because I think there's a lot of shame in especially in the nonprofit sector where we work with people with tremendous problems. And I think a lot of times people will be like, I have nothing to complain about. I get a paycheck. I have education. I have all these benefits and opportunities and I serve a population that doesn't even come close to what I have. And so to be quote unquote selfish or mindful of what we need to be doing so that we can continue our work, I don't know why Anthony, but it seems to be kind of like a new discussion. And we're talking about mindfulness and my personal feeling is it's because we've lost so many people. We have such a bleed off of leadership that now it's like, oh, this is a problem versus this has been a problem all along. It's just that we have a labor issue. And so it's very interesting for me to hear you talk about this. I've got to believe that this is from the top issue too. If you have leadership that you're always trying to outperform or using them for social cues, if they're not going to do this themselves, it's got to be hard, right? To do it your own. Yes, because if you don't have someone to model it for you, it's kind of hard to pioneer it on your own. And that's a very good point. Very good point. Part of the difficulty of finding models is some of it, to me, is primal. Simon Sinek wrote a book several years ago talking about leadership last. And in it, he goes through the different chemicals that we have been given biologically to incentivize us for certain activity. One of them, if I'm not mistaken, is endorphins. And endorphins have been given to the human being. It's a part of our chemical makeup. And he says it was given for primal reasons so that we would not get tired on the hunt so that we would move, that it would mask the pain, right? So when you are running, running, running, your body is feeling some challenges because you're running, running, running. But if you're going to eat, you're going to have to catch that particular animal to go out there and get it and survive. And so the endorphins were given to us so that we might be able to extend ourselves or overextend ourselves. If physical exertion, from a physical exertion perspective, in order to survive. He said the other thing that releases endorphins is also laughing. So laughing sometimes is doing something to you, but you don't feel it because you're releasing those endorphins. And I think passion for mission releases endorphins for many leaders to the degree where it masks the pain or they consciously or sometimes subconsciously look over it as if it doesn't exist because they are so passionate about the cause. And for them, I'd say take a lesson from the flight attendant. It is if your child is sitting next to you on the plane, it is not selfish to put your mask on first because your asset is your mind. And without those natural elements like oxygen feeding your mind, you won't be in a position to help the helpless. So if you want to maintain an ideal performance state, you need to take care of yourself so that you can take care of others. And you need to do it systematically, systematically because you are automatically going to create systems for taking care of others. You need to make sure you've got systems for taking care of you. I love that. You know, that kind of leads to the next question and part of what we're going to talk about. And that is, you know, you use these three words, rest, reset and recover. How do we unlock those? And how do we kind of self assess and then self deliver? So that's a wonderful question. Julia, my goodness. These questions are amazing. So when it comes to this formulaic way of beating burnout so that you can achieve some rest, some reset and some recovery, it really involves the author say ritual. They say make it ritualistic. A way to operationalize it or put a kind of professional spin on that term, just maintain the concept is to make it systematic and intentional, right? So it's a repeated thing that you do systematically and intentionally over and over again. And at different levels of who you are, you may need different rituals. So how do you replenish or gain rest, reset, recover physically? You may need a ritual for that. So how is it, if it's a bedtime practice, if it's a before bedtime practice, if it's when I wake up in the morning, it's some type of practice to get my body ready for the day or to help my body recover from my day. Then at the emotional level, you may have other things that you do. You may ride home listening to no music. Other people to reset emotionally, they may ride home listening to music. Listening, yeah. Then you got other types of rituals that you can do to reset the mind and to reset yourself spiritually. Now, I would advocate for one particular ritual and it's got a few parts, right? Write, read, run, rest, review, and repeat. Say it again. Okay, yeah. Write, read, run, then you got to rest, then you review, then you repeat. Now, for those high performers, you want to write your mission, write your personal vision, write your goals, and for you to get inspiration to run, you got to read them. You got to make it a ritual to go back and revisit what you've written. Write, go ahead and read them. And then you run for a while. So maybe January, you wrote your goals, you read them, spend the first quarter running. Run, run, run, run, but after you run, make sure you schedule some time to rest. So maybe April 1st, no April Fool, you rest for real. Right, right. And while you're resting, you take some time to review those goals and then you repeat it all over again. So maybe when you review them, you say, you know what, there's some things I want to adjust here. So let me rewrite something. Well, I've rewritten it, let me reread it. Now let me spend the second quarter running. And you could develop rituals in the spirit of this particular ritual, write, read, run, rest, review, repeat. And that will help you to maintain insight and oversight of your own capacity so that you don't hit that burnout barrier again. If you schedule time every quarter to rest and review your goals, maybe you can adjust for how you're feeling at the time to lessen the workload, to increase the workload and keep moving. That way you don't hit that burnout barrier again. You know, it's interesting. It seems to me like when I'm hearing you say this, it needs to go on our calendars. It needs to be like a, you know, it has to be calendarized for the whole year and not just a, oh, whoops, it's the end of the year. I gotta review my goals. I mean, I know you and I've talked about that, is that, you know, we, oh, we have to have goals. We have to set this up. We spend all this time and energy and stress and we give a lot of hope to it. And then it sits on a shelf or we don't revisit it until like the year is up. And then it's catastrophic because we're like, crap, we didn't make it. Or, you know, versus moving through and really assessing throughout the year. Very interesting. Exactly, exactly. That calendar piece is critical. Because there are other things that we automatically schedule, right? We've got ritual celebrations scheduled. My birthday, wedding anniversary, the children's birthdays, other things. We've got ritual celebrations already programmed. And maybe you need a ritual celebration to celebrate yourself, but getting it on a schedule. And I know every personality may feel differently about scheduling things, but that helps it to be systematic and intentional. Systematic and intentional. The other thing is, have somebody holding you accountable for these rest times too. So it's just not all you. So you don't have any executive powers to override your rest period. Because if you are a high performer, nine times out of 10, when you see rest on a calendar, you're going to find something else more important than that. So you may need an accountability partner to say, no, you can't make that decision unilaterally. Let's take a break. Yeah, I mean, it's such an interesting thing because I feel like a lot of us, you know, we look at the weekend for that rest and recovery. But in modern society, we've filled those things up with things we need to do for our homes, our children, our families. I mean, it's a, you know, I'm guilty of that too. You know, a lot of times the weekend is like, okay, I can finally get back into my office with no interruption. It'll be quiet and I'll get all this work done. Yep, that's usually how that goes. And using the weekend, not to do nothing at all, but to do something that helps you come down from the things you've done for the last four or five days. Like before we came on, you were talking about your salsa garden. So gardening, touching the dirt, getting closer, that could be some type of physical engagement that disengages the mind from what you're doing for work so that the mind has a downtime even though the body is having an uptime, right? That's that dance, that's that oscillation that keeps you out of the enemy of linearity when you're talking about avoiding burnout. You have to utilize your time wisely so that you don't go back to your default setting, which is I'm going to use the weekend to work some more. You know, Anthony, we don't have a lot of time, but I want to tell you this. Yesterday I was speaking with a CEO and she was telling me that she had bought wearables for her C-suite. And she did it as a mindfulness she wasn't thinking that it was stress at work but that it was really so that they could kind of get a baseline and then think about different things, maybe go for a walk in the afternoon or lunch or, you know, it was just, I think, a really interesting thing. And they had some monthly reports given at a meeting. And she said that everybody was shocked at how when they had to get up in front of their group, which was sizable, that their stress level went up. And she said they all had like this epiphany about it's not just working with clients, but it's how we think about ourselves and our own performance. And so what you're saying today has been magical because I literally had this conversation with her yesterday. And she was just shocked, you know, and she said that first we thought it was malfunctioning because we're like, we stand up and we talk, you know, we give reports, but the stress that it was actually inducing was real and it was measurable. Fascinating. And just imagine if those types of engagements are happening back to back to back to back. So you got presented and in this meeting and then you go from that high stress, even if it goes well, from experience and the height level of stress, and you didn't get a break in between to come down and now you're in the next meeting. And it's also about a challenging issue or circumstance. I may not be presenting, but it's just a challenging conversation. And to have that going on all day really has implications on employee satisfaction and employee performance. So having that data is one way to start putting things in place to make sure that you are doing best by your team. So that's an amazing, amazing illustration and example. Thank you for sharing that. Well, I have to come back to you with what they decide. Right? Because I mean, there was notice, it was just the observation just rocked their world and they were just still processing it. And so I'll report back because I thought it was an absolutely fascinating situation and it completely dovetails to what you're saying today with us. Anthony A. Dix Jr., Senior Leadership Consultant at 180 Management Group. We are so delighted to have you with us. I always learn so much from you and you really spark, I think, a lot of ideas that take us to the next level, right? And so it's really a cool, cool thing to have you on the nonprofit show and guiding us through these challenging times as we do with the nonprofit sector. Check out 180managementgroup.com and you can learn all about their practice and the different folks that work with them. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. Here at Ransom, the nonprofit nerd will be back with us tomorrow. Again, we have so many amazing partners with us and they include Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Nonprofit Thought Leader, Staffing Boutique, Your Part-Time Controller, 180 Management Group, Fundraising Academy at National University, JMT Consulting, Nonprofit Nerd and Nonprofit Tech Talk. These are the folks that join this day in and day out. Okay, Anthony, you sparked me up. I'm really going to be thinking about what you said and I'm going to be thinking about that pyramid of performance. Yeah, it's good. That's good. And I can't wait to hear what unfolds as a result of that CEO's idea to get wearables for everybody and see what moves they make to manage people's stress and energy a little bit differently and systematically, you've got my wheels turning. So thank you so very much for having me on again. I really appreciate it. Well, it's been really a lot of fun. Anthony, we end every episode of The Nonprofit Show with this mantra and it means something different. I swear, every day we've done nearly 1,000 shows and today it really, really means something different and our message is this, to stay well. So you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow.