Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and today, we are talking about burnouts and I’m going to be totally honest. I actually really went back and forth on if I even wanted to record this podcast or not.
One of the reasons I actually went back and forth on it is I think the idea of burnout is very polarizing, but not in the right ways at all, like almost for all the wrong reasons.
I kept seeing so many industry educators talk about burnout and burnout’s happening and everybody’s feeling burnt out and just take a break and ways to decompress from burnout and go on a walk. I understand it’s normalizing this pain point that a lot of us are going through, myself included. The reason I was hesitant to talk about this is not because I don’t think burnout is real. Not because I don’t think people get burnt out. A hundred percent they do, not because I’m anti-working with balance. I’m pro-working with balance, right? How many podcasts do I have where I talk about the areas of wealth: time, love, health, and money? I am very all about working with balance. I’m anti-burnout.
But what I kept noticing is this pattern of how to identify burnout. What are signs of burnout? But there was just this la—and then like how to decompress after you’ve been burned out. But there was this lack of burnout prevention, and what I didn’t want to do was add to the noise or just talk about this concept that because it’s become polarizing, it’s almost normalized burnout and breaks, and that’s what I don’t want to do.
Taking a break to me is almost like a bad word. Not because I don’t think people should have life balance, but I want you to think about it. Think about taking a business break, like taking a break in your marriage. Okay, this is an extreme example, but not really. When I look at a career, why do any of us choose to go into business or have a career or work a job? It’s because we’re trying to generate revenue to support ourselves or our family, and hopefully we find a career that we love so we never have to work a day in our life, right? That’s the goal. But generally we all work or create a business or have career aspirations because we want to create a bigger, better life for ourselves.
Do you at any point take a break from that dream of creating a great life for yourself? Not from working or working with focus, but are you ever like, “You know what? In this season, I actually don’t want to have a good life.” No.
Now we all go through seasons of hardship, but this has always been the issue for me of this idea of take a break from doing what needs to happen so that your life is beautiful. That’s always been this disconnect for me, and that’s where it comes back to the break in marriage.
I am married. I’ve been married since 2008. My husband and I have been together for almost 22 years, which is like a lifetime, like way more than half our lifetime, our lives we’ve been together. Marriage is extremely difficult. If anybody tells you otherwise, they’re a liar. It’s this very complex partnership that you’ve promised to this other person that you are going to compromise with them for decades. It’s such a huge ask and if anybody’s been married a long time like me, you know it’s a lot of work.
If my husband and I were to decide at some point, “let’s take a break,” for me, I would ask myself, “Wow, when did we decide that just doing the work together wasn’t going to be enough?” If we hit a rough spot in our marriage, we go to therapy, which for me is like bringing in an educator. It’s not an educator, it’s a licensed professional, but I’m trying to frame it in the business sense too. We bring in a guest expert who’s able to help us to understand why we feel like we should be taking a break in our marriage so that we don’t have to, so that instead, we get the tools we need to navigate forward.
If we hit a break in our marriage where we’re both just completely exhausted by life, by the work we’re doing, by the pace we’re running, by whatever choices either of us have made, we don’t say, “You know what? I’m going to take a break from you for six weeks and then let’s hope that after six weeks we’re going to come back together and our marriage is going to be fixed,” because it’s not. Instead, we have to choose to every single day make different choices. If we’re doing something that’s not working, we fix it. We don’t take a break from this commitment we’ve made to each other. Instead we choose to work through.
Now is that what everybody does in marriage? No. Do some people take a break in marriage and they come back together and it works out? Yes. Is that the exception, not the rule? A thousand percent, right? We know the divorce rate in this country is 50%, so most people at the point where they choose to take a break or they throw in the towel. Half are just failing.
I don’t want half of stylists and salon owners to fail. I want the vast majority to win and I do think that the vast majority to win—if my business vision is to empower 1,000,000 six-figure stylists, a part of that has to be to create the mentality and mindset that we don’t need a break from business. We need to create a business that we don’t require breaks from. You know what I mean?
There’s a difference between a break and a vacation, right? There’s a difference between a break and time off. I take vacations and time off all the time. You should see how many vacations I’m taking in 2023. Plenty. I never take a break from my business. It’s two very different things. The reason why, to me when we say take a break or I’m feeling burnt out, it’s like I can’t keep running this marathon anymore. I’m exhausted by it. I don’t see the hope in it. I don’t feel like the work is worth it.
When we look at burnout, it’s usually because we’re not getting the result we want, right? When you’re working hard but you’re getting a killer result that fuels the dream lifestyle you’re seeking, generally you don’t need a break from it. Some of you are like, “Well, Britt, for me, I’m making all the money but I’m exhausted.” Yeah, yeah. But go back to what I just said. If you have created a life structure where you get to make all the money and you’re not exhausted, why would you ever need a break from that?
If you’re the stylist who’s making all the money but you’re completely exhausted, again, to me it goes back to you don’t need a break. You need a better system and structure that you don’t need to take a break from.
Again, the reason why I hesitated to dig into burnout is I wanted to make sure that this was a strategic podcast that was about preventing burnout and making smart choices, not just coping when it inevitably comes up. Learning how to cope and manage burnout when it comes up is certainly a skill and a technique. But if we could prevent it from the jump, wouldn’t that be a stronger tactic?
What is that whole thing about give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man a fish and he’ll eat for his lifetime. I want you to eat for your lifetime.
I created this assessment, graphic, schematic, chart if you will and it will go up on my @brittseva Instagram the week of May the 15th, 2023, so if you’re listening to this late, you can go back and scroll and find it. But I created this visual and I spent weeks really thinking about what causes burnout? Why do people in the industry feel burnt out? I think I’ve really dialed it in.
I want you to listen in closely because I am going to help you diagnose your burnout, the root causes, and how to ensure that they do not keep popping up in your business.
As I record this podcast, I’m looking at the visual right now. You’ll get to see it on my Instagram soon. But the way that we look at burnout analysis and the reason why burnout exists is the balance between investment and impact. The balance between investment and impact.
Now investment—there are two resources we use to invest in our business and our lives in this lifetime. What are the two resources? Time and money. When I say investment, I’m talking about investing time and investing money. When we look at impact, there’s both positive and negative impact.
When we look at this chart, we have low investment/negative impact activities, we have low investment/positive impact activities, and then we have high investment/negative impact activities, and high investment/positive impact activities.
Now what we mostly want is high investment/positive impact activities. By the end of this podcast, you’re going to deeply understand why.
Let’s start with the low investment/negative impact activities ‘cause this is what we want the least of, right? Low investment/negative impact activities would be choosing to sustain business hoping something will change, right? “I hope that if I keep doing what I’m doing long enough, something good will happen.”
Have you ever heard the saying good things come to those who wait? That’s a lie. That may have worked when technology wasn’t here or life was slower or I have no idea. It’s not true today.
When I say it’s low investment, you don’t have to do a damn thing to continue sustaining your business as it is and hoping something changes, but also it will have a negative impact. The world will pass you by.
Doing services you don’t enjoy, low investment/negative impact, doing services you don’t enjoy. Can you do them? Yes. Will it cause burnout? Ultimately 1000%. Will doing services you don’t enjoy ultimately make the money you’re dreaming of making? Without a doubt, no. That’s low investment, negative impact.
Taking a break instead of making a plan for sustainability. Again, like we talked about at the beginning of this episode, taking a break is pretty low investment. You can just pull the trigger. It doesn’t cost you anything. It actually gains you time, which is great because now instead of working in your business or doing anything strategically, you’ve taken a B word and you’ve decided you’re just going to go to work, do the bare minimum, and relax, which relaxing feels great. But again, there’s a real difference between creating sustainable structure, taking vacations as often as you’d like to while making the money you want to make, and throwing in the towel and taking breaks instead of making a plan for sustainability.
That’s low investment/negative impact.
Lastly, allowing others to influence your education and business choices rather than seeking out what you truly need.
How many of you are waiting to see what others are up to and then, based on their decisions, you’ll make your own or you are afraid to be the first one to do something? Or if you do something, somebody might judge you for it? Well, that will keep you playing very small. It’s a low investment to not make your own choices, to not think for yourself, to not do your own research, to wait to be told what to do. That’s certainly low investment. It will also have a negative impact. One of my favorite things to think about, and I think this about this all the time just as Brittany, the human that I am in my personal life, is when I’m at a crossroads or when I’m feeling tired or when I’m having a negative interaction with somebody, I say, “Brittany, when you’re 85 years old and you’re looking back on your lifetime, will this moment in time even hit your highlight reel?” Almost always that’s definitely a no. “Do you want to allow this fear, this person’s insights, this person’s opinion of you truly dictate the next 50 decades of your life?” I don’t. Very rarely would I say yes. Unless it’s my husband or my kids, it’s pretty much a no.
When you have that moment of why am I waiting for somebody else to tell me what to do? Why am I worried about what anybody else thinks? It’s very freeing. But allowing the opinions of others and others’ judgements to rule your world is low investment and massively negative impact.
We obviously don’t want to be doing any of those activities, so let’s look at the high investment/negative impact activities because I think this is where a lot of us spend our time.
Again, this is high investment, negative impact, and if you feel personally attacked on this one, I do understand.
The first: scrolling social media. The reason why that’s high investment is some of you are scrolling social media five to 20 hours a week. Isn’t that bonkers? If you’re scrolling social media even for an hour a day and listen, even if you do it six minutes at a time, the average person is checking into social media seven times a day, right? So if you’re on social media even an hour a day and you spend a lot of time scrolling, that could be seven hours of your week.
So when people say, “I just don’t have the time,” it’s like well, you’re spending seven hours a week scrolling TikTok and Instagram. If you were to spend even half of those hours doing something strategic, my gosh, the impact it would have for you.
The other thing about social media and the reason why it has a negative impact is how many of you when you scroll social media, it makes you feel less than? Sometimes we follow people we look up to, but then they make us feel so far away from where we need to be that it doesn’t actually build us up. Maybe you follow a stylist or a salon that you’re like, “I want to be like them when I grow up,” but every time you watch them, it makes you realize how not like that you are.
There’s a difference between being inspired and seeing an overwhelming number of people who are not where you are and it makes you feel small.
I invite you to check yourself and ask yourself how much time you’re spending scrolling and how your feed is making you feel. If, when you scroll your feed, you’re not learning, you’re not growing, you’re not feeling inspired, it’s time to cleanse who you follow and shake that feed up.
I also encourage you to set a timer and choose not to scroll more than 30 minutes a day. Challenge accepted.
Next, paying for education and not applying the techniques. I’m calling you out on this one. How many of you have invested—remember, this is high investment/negative impact. You’ve invested time or money in education, learned some stuff but not actually applied it. Well, that’s a giant waste of time. We do that because it’s more comfortable and easy.
When we’re in a learning environment, our adrenaline and our inspiration surges. When we have to go back to the salon and actually apply the techniques and do the work, it declines. However, pushing through that is going to give you the results you want and that’s what I encourage you to do.
Next, discounting client services. Let’s just say that you discount every guest by just 10 bucks. You see five clients a day and you work four days a week. I just ran the math on that. You’ll lose $10,000 a year. Isn’t that wild? On $10 per client discounting, that costs you $10,000 in a year. It adds up really quick. High investment/negative impact. There’s nothing good that’s going to come of that.
Next, working an unsustainable schedule. Very high investment of your time, energy, and efforts, and a negative impact generally on your personal life and your family. Worrying about fear of judgment or spending time judging others. Both are incredibly toxic behavior. I always feel sad when I see clients or stylists or peers or anybody choosing to spend time tearing another person down. First of all, it makes me very sad because people who act like that are generally just unhappy themselves. It’s usually not a reflection of the person being attacked. It’s an insecurity of the person doing the attacking ‘cause they don’t know what else to do. If they were to spend again half that energy working on building themselves up, they’d actually see a true, tangible result. Generally tearing somebody else down or judging somebody else doesn’t produce any kind of positive result for anybody. It generally is a pretty big waste of time.
The other thing is worrying about the fear of judgment. If you spend your whole life worrying about what others are going to think of you, that’s a really high investment way of thinking with a negative impact.
Next, we get to low investment/positive impact activities. I think a lot of you actually spend time here as well. I think in the last category, in this current category is when we spend most of our time.
Participating in free education or podcasts, low investment, right? Short, sweet, free, or very low cost. Positive impact. It fills the inspiration tank, it feels really good. Next, we have listening to mentors and peers that make you feel empowered, right? Kind of the polar opposite of the scroll I was talking about. Following those that lift you up is low investment/very positive impact. Unfollowing and creating distance from those who don’t lift you up or help you grow. Again, low investment/very positive impact.
Reading business books, right? For less than 20 bucks and a few hours of reading, you can really empower yourself. Low investment/positive impact.
Next, creating a daily me time routine. Now for me, my family knows there is a routine after dinner every single night. You can ask my kids or my husband about this. I walk away for about an hour and I do whatever the heck it is I want to do and nobody interrupts me. It is my me time. It is critical. It makes me a kinder wife, a kinder mother. Everybody respects the time and it works well for me.
That wouldn’t work for everybody. I have older children now, right? It works in the season of life I’m in. This is not something I’ve always had, but for me, it was low investment/positive impact to take that time, right? It works for me. It makes a huge shift in my energy, my focus, everything.
When I say all of those things, all of those things sound really positive, so how could they cause burnout? Remember, that’s what this whole thing is about, is things that cause burnout.
Here’s where this all comes together. Those low investment/positive impact activities I just shared, as I’m saying that a lot of you are nodding your head and you’re like, “I do all of those things and I love them.” Listen to the list I just created. Free education and podcasts, listening to mentors and peers, reading business books, daily me time routines. All of these things are good. They all also add to the amount of time you’re investing every single week, every single day.
When people say I’m burnt out and then I look and they’re listening to a bunch of different podcasts, they’re currently trying to read a business book, they’re participating in a bunch of free trainings, maybe they’re participating in paid trainings, they’re connecting with others, they’re in a mastermind, it’s like you are spending so much time seeking positivity and seeking relief from burnout that you’re actually creating it.
People do this all the time unknowingly. They fill their plate very high with positive impact activities. Unfortunately, a lot of the low investment positive impact activities don’t actually produce tangible business results. They feel good, it’s a good way to spend your time, but what happens is the result doesn’t come or it doesn’t come fast enough. Because of that, you feel like you’re going through the motions, you’re doing all the right things, but you’re not getting the results. That causes massive burnout.
How many of you just had a light bulb moment where you’re like, “Holy cow, I feel like I’ve been doing all the right stuff, but I am burnt the F out and I don’t know how to catch a break.” Well, let me share with you the high investment/positive impact activities. This category I’m about to share is the only category that does not contribute to burnout. Everything else I just said feeds right into the burnout reaction.
Creating structure in your business that allows for true life balance. Thrivers Society is a really great way to do that if you just want a structured program where you get in, you learn what to do, how to do it, check all the boxes, and get the system up and running. You do have to pay for it. It’s not a massively high investment. I think it’s actually the lowest-cost business-based education in the industry today, but it is very positive impact. It doesn’t have to be Thrivers Society, but if it’s not that, it should be something else that creates structure in your business that allows for true life balance as your income continues to grow.
Next, investing in impactful education and actually doing the work. I know the work is not the fun part, it’s also where the results come from. If we could get good results with minimal effort, wouldn’t everybody and their mother choose to be a hair stylist? You’re going to have to do the work.
Releasing fear and I put releasing fear as very high investment because to get through fear, we have to find confidence, which is not easy. We have to learn to love ourselves. We have to learn to release the fear of judgment. We have to choose to put ourselves first and in doing so, that’s a major investment.
There’s arguably nothing with greater impact than choosing to release your fear of failure. Release your fear of judgment, release your fear of incompetence, and instead working to choose to build self-confidence. That is probably just about the best thing you can do.
Lastly, demanding time for self-work. That’s high investment/positive impact. Self-work for some of you is skills-based education. Self-work for some of you is how to speak to people. For some of you it’s how to do consultations, it’s business building behind the chair. For some of you, self-work is going to therapy. For some of you, it’s reconnecting with your spirituality. It can be anything for any number of people, but generally speaking, the reason it’s high investment is sacrifices will have to be made.
What I have found is that a lot of people are very hesitant to make sacrifices even if it pushes their business forward. Often we’re hesitant to make sacrifices because we’re worried about the hard conversations that have to happen to make that possible. Again, that goes back to our high investment/negative impact activities, which is worrying about the fear of judgment or spending time judging others, right? It’s very circular. This whole system is.
I want you to think to yourself, “Am I really spending time on just the right things or am I making excuses and choosing the low investment/positive impact route? Or am I uncertain of what to do, so I’m choosing the high investment/negative impact activities? Or am I just like barely getting by and I’m honestly low investment/negative impact?”
This is the call to crosscheck yourself, to ask where you’re spending your time, where you’re spending your energy, where you’re spending your efforts, who you’re spending your time with, and how you can recalibrate to eliminate the burnout.
Release a lot of the noise that’s on your plate, and instead choose the 24 hours in a day that each of us have to focus really, really wisely to just get to the good part.
Y’all, I hope this was helpful for you. This was a really big one to me. I would love for you to leave a rating or review on iTunes. Let me know what questions have come up for you. If there’s anything I can do to support, you can always find me in the DMs on Instagram @brittseva, and as I always love to say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
