IAM1667 – Certified Virtual Speaker Helps People Manage Burnout

Michael Levitt Teaser: 00:00

Probably the biggest one that I tell people time and time again, especially as an executive, is to quit emailing your staff after hours and on weekends. Just stop doing that, please.

Intro 00:13

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders, without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I am CEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:40

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I am CEO podcast and I appreciate you listening to this episode. And if you've been listening this year, we're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes under certain categories or topics. That we think are gonna be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners.

This month is going to be about not forgetting about the human part of business. Often we forget about the human part of life. We often forget about the human part of business. So look for self-care tips, fitness, burnout, purpose, biz and personal, personal branding, motivation, drive success, understanding your why, and of course, how important customer service is. But at the heart of it, it's all about, remember the human part of business. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the I am CEO podcast.

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the I am CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Michael Levitt of the Breakfast Leadership Network. Michael, it's great to have you on the show.

Michael Levitt 01:38

Great to be on the show with you today.

Gresham Harkless 01:40

Definitely super excited to have you on and before we jumped into the interview, I wanted to read a little bit more about Michael, so you'd hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. And Michael is the founder and chief Burnout officer of the Breakfast Leadership Network, a San Diego and Toronto-based burnout media firm. He is an in-person and certified virtual speaker, a certified NLP and CBT therapist, a Fortune 500 consultant and author of the new book Burnout Proof. Michael hosts the Breakfast Leadership Show, a top 200 global podcast on iTunes, and Michael's a top 20 Global Thought Leader on HR & Culture with Thinkers360 and a former healthcare executive overseeing $2 billion budgets.

Michael, great to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I'm CEO community?

Michael Levitt 02:25

Let's do it.

[restrict paid=”true”]

Gresham Harkless 02:26

Awesome. Let's do it then. So to kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit, and hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

Michael Levitt 02:34

Yeah. My CEO story has had different flavors for sure. In my current role chief Burnout Officer, one of the fun titles that I gave myself, but I am the CEO of Breakfast Leadership Network, and that organization was birthed almost five years ago now. And it came about from an observation of burnout. A lot of people in a variety of different sectors were burning out, and this is before the COVID 19 pandemic. More importantly, that burnout story has a deeper meaning to me because from 2009 to 2010, I had what I like to call my year of worst-case scenarios where burnout was the cause of these scenarios. So, over a period of 369 days from May 2009 to May 2010, the following happened to me. I had a heart attack that should have killed me, I lost my job during the great recession, my car was repossessed, and then finally my home was foreclosed. Wow. All those things happened in a year, and all of those things happened because I was burned out. I wasn't taking care of myself.

I was making mistakes at work. When you're on unemployment, during the Great Recession and you're on heart medication that costs you a thousand dollars a month and you don't have any drug insurance coverage, you have to make some choices. Do I eat and take this medication to help me stay alive or do I make car payments? Well, I chose the food and the medication road, and of course, the bank reserved the right to take the vehicle back and they did. And the same situation with the house and the mortgage. Obviously, all of those situations are pretty extreme to happen, but for all four of them to happen in one year was pretty significant for me. It gave me another opportunity, which I'm thankful for because when you're laying on a procedure table in the hospital and the cardiologist looks at you and says, you don't know how lucky you are to be alive right now, it's pretty eye-opening to say the least. I did joke with him. So you skipped the bedside manner class in medical school, I see. We all laughed and had a good time with it. I figured I probably shouldn't pick on the guy that's gonna cut me open, and put stents in my artery. I should probably be a little bit more polite. But it was worth it. He got the joke. But at the end of the day, all those things happened because I was burned out and I was living a life that created those burnout scenarios.

After recovering from all of that and finding a new job and relocation and moving and all of that good stuff, I had a choice. I could have said, well, I survived all of that. I'm Superman. I guess I'm invincible or, I took a deeper, harder look at my life and how I was living it and made some pretty significant adjustments in my life. I want to frame this really quick for people that are burning out or think they might be burning out. 99.9% of people do not need to reinvent their life. They just need to make a couple of adjustments here and there and how they do things. It'll make a big difference. In my particular situation, because of the severity of my burnout and the other things that were going on in my life, I did need to do a deep dive and figure out, okay, why did I make the choices that I made? Why did I do what I did? Why did I eat the way that I did all the things? And said, okay, I don't ever want to go through that again because I nearly died the first time. I don't want to give that an opportunity to have another swing at me because it could be successful the second time around.

So I made the adjustments and started living a great life and started looking around at my colleagues. I worked in the healthcare sector at that point, and I started seeing a lot of people going down the same road that I did. And it scared me and I thought, okay, I need to do something about this. So I started researching and writing about it, which then, birthed my company because I thought, okay, this is a bigger problem than I thought it was. I started writing about it, started my own podcast show and started speaking at conferences and working with organizations and it took on a life of its own. And here I am today, wrote Burnout Proof, and got that out in the wild earlier this year. And it's been, a nonstop adventure ever since.

Gresham Harkless 06:53

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I definitely appreciate you for sharing that, and it sounds like to take care of self and so that you don't sometimes hit that wall or whatever, we might call it or phrase it as, because it's hard to reinvent yourself and come back and it's definitely, you've been given a gift for sure.

Michael Levitt 07:07

I agree. Yeah, it was not easy. For people to make adjustments in their life, I know it's not easy even because a lot of it is habit forming and we all have habits that are very difficult to implement and some habits that we have that are very hard to break. So for me, I knew it was gonna be a tough go of it because I literally had to do a deep review of my life, my beliefs, my thoughts, my habits, why I believed in things, and why it was so important for me to work the insane hours that I did led up to my cardiac event.

I had to do a deep dive and go, okay, why was that important to me? Why did I feel like I had to work those long days every day for two solid years? Why was that important to me? What was my end goal? What was I trying to accomplish? And was it realistic one and two, was it actually that important? Was it gonna make that big of a difference for me to work those hours compared to working a normal schedule and having a little bit more work-life harmony.

Gresham Harkless 08:10

Yeah. That's absolutely huge. I appreciate you going through those questions and the kind of that evaluation that you went through, I imagine, over a period of time. But I think it's so important for us to take a look at the things that we're doing as well too because often we can get into a place where we're creating habits and doing things on a regular basis, and not be even sure why we're doing them because we feel like we should or we have to. But really to inspect that and understand and look at that on all sides and see why exactly we're doing that is something that is at the very least, a great exercise.

Michael Levitt 08:38

Yeah, I agree. I agree. It's been very helpful for me and it's helped me work with teams and individuals as well.

Gresham Harkless 08:44

Yeah, absolutely. And, so I wanted to hear a little bit more about that work with teams, the leadership network and everything you're doing there, and of course your new book. Could you take us through a little bit more on what that looks like, how you serve your clients, and what you feel maybe even sets you apart and makes you unique?

Michael Levitt 08:57

Yeah, I think, I'll answer the last part first. What makes me unique is I know what burnout feels like and looks like and tastes like. And I know, one of the side effects, yes, we know it's fatigue and you're wiped out and you don't feel good and you're lethargic and you make mistakes at work and all that good stuff. But I also know the secondary event of it where you could literally lose everything, including your life. That's an extreme case, but unfortunately, I'm seeing more and more people burning out. They're definitely flirting with that and it's not something that I would ever wish upon anyone. So I hate seeing and hearing the stories of people burning out.

The work I do with organizations and speaking at conferences and whatnot is to bring awareness to what burnout is. This is because a lot of people hear the phrase burnout, but they may not know what the definition of it is. And it's prolonged stress with fatigue and you feel overwhelmed and you're just not living your ideal life. You're just completely feeling like you're being pulled in all kinds of different directions and it's due to prolonged stress. Well, this pandemic has been prolonged and it's been stressful, so you can see why a lot of people are burning out.

The Hartford insurance company did a survey recently and the employees that they surveyed indicated that 61% are identified, as feeling a little bit burned out or, dramatically burned out. So that's six out of 10 people. That's a pandemic within the pandemic. That's really problematic. So the work I do with organizations is, we focus on communications and expectations and habits and behaviors of employees and management and getting them all on the same page of what is a priority, what isn't, when should we work and when shouldn't we work.

Gresham Harkless 10:41

Yeah. That makes so much sense. I wanted to switch gears a little bit, but it might be related to what we're just talking about, which I wanted to ask you for what I call like CEO hacks, which are like apps, books, or habits that people have that make them more effective and efficient.

But it doesn't have to be around burnout, but I was just wondering. Would you consider like those ingredients you talked about, like addressing and being aware of those ingredients as being like a hack and understanding how to get a good night's sleep, how to make sure that you're consuming and putting the right things into your body, and just all of those things that sometimes we equate with keeping our cup full as being really great hacks?

Michael Levitt 11:14

One of the things I do is I'm very diligent about my calendar and I schedule pretty much everything. Now bodily functions and things like that, I don't put those on my calendar, I'm not that crazy. But I do use time blocks and I also color code my calendar, so meetings and phone calls, podcast interviews, writing all the other things that I do, I use separate colors on my calendar for those things.

For my self-care time, which is not just yoga, meditation, or moments of zen type of thing, but things that I like doing, enjoying, that I like, reading or watching a baseball game or, going for a walk or anything like that. I schedule that, but I also use my favorite color for my self-care time. And the reason why I use my favorite color, which happens to be blue, is when I look at my calendar at like a week set, so for seven days I can squint my eyes and I can still see the colors. If I don't see enough blue, then I know that my week is a little bit out of harmony with everything else.

Gresham Harkless 12:18

I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO Nugget. So this could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client, or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

Michael Levitt 12:28

Probably the biggest one that I tell people time and time again, especially as an executive, is to quit emailing your staff after hours and on weekends. Just stop doing that, please. unless you're a 24/7 shop, then okay, you're emailing people that are working those shifts. So that would be different. But in many situations, we're not.

Gresham Harkless 12:50

Truly appreciate that. I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO, and we're hoping to have different quote and quote CEOs on the show. So, Michael, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Michael Levitt 13:01

Being a CEO for me is a gift. It allows me to do what I want, where I want, and when I want, but in a way that uses my gifts and experiences to serve others because leadership is serving. It's a wonderful gift to be able to do that. It's not bestowed upon everybody. There are some people that are in leadership roles that are struggling because it's not natural for them, but it doesn't mean they can't be a leader. They have to do some self-investment to learn how to be a better leader and learn from the great.

Completely, as I like to say, permanently borrow from the greats as far as how to lead. And there's no shortage of great leaders in history that we can emulate and learn from. So, just remind yourself as a leader, it's a gift to be able to lead. So, treat it wisely.

Gresham Harkless 13:52

Yeah, I absolutely love that. And saying it, success leaves clues. So to be able to tap into those great leaders, those great minds in so many different ways is definitely, an opportunity that we all have at our fingertips a lot of the time. I love that gift aspect because a lot of times to get the opportunity to use our gifts, is a gift in and of itself. So I love the opportunity and the gift to be able to use our gifts to be able to make our businesses, our lives, and the world a better place.

So Michael, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know, and of course how best they can get ahold of you, get a copy of the book, subscribe to the podcast, and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

Michael Levitt 14:31

Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, breakfastleadership.com is the best place to find me. I'm on most of the social media channels. If you look under the letter B and then fast leadership, don't put that on a license plate or if you look up hashtag breakfast leadership, you should be able to find me in a variety of different places. The podcast is the Breakfast Leadership Show, and it's available on pretty much all the platforms.

The book Burnout Proof is available. You can order it online on Amazon. Barnes and Noble also sell it as well. And I'll be more than happy to engage with your audience and people reach out, and send me a message on any of those platforms. I'm, pretty responsive on all of them. I'd be more than happy to help guide an individual or an organization, to burnout-proof their life or their company.

Gresham Harkless 15:17

Michael, I truly appreciate that. We will have the links and information in the show notes and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day

Outro 15:22

thank you for listening to the I am CEO podcast, powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I am CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community.

Don't forget to schedule your complimentary digital marketing consultation at blue16media.com. This has been the I am CEO podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you for listening.

[/restrict]