Hi,
I'm Dr.
Diana Hill.
I'm a clinical psychologist.
I specialize in helping people.
Direct their energy in ways that align with their values and engaging in what I call wise effort.
And I want to show you why burnout is not a time management issue.
It's actually an energy direction issue.
I don't want to just show it to you.
I actually want you to practice a little practice with me in engaging in wiser effort in your life.
And in this practice,
You're going to need a big piece of paper.
You could have a giant notepad like me,
Or you could even do this on an iPad.
But what I'd like for you to do on your piece of paper is draw a matrix on the x-axis.
Along that matrix.
We're going to have your values,
What matters to you,
What you care about.
Pointing to the left is low values.
And pointing to the right is high values.
So all day long,
We're making choices.
To put our energy in the direction of our values or away from our values.
We may have a moment where we're deciding what to do in our 10 minutes between one thing to the next and then 10 minutes we may choose to go outside and go for a walk.
Maybe take a moment and connect with a tree,
Maybe even take a breath and connect with ourselves.
And those things may be aligned with your values around taking care of yourself or connecting to nature.
Your values are personal and chosen by you.
We also may choose in those 10 minutes to do things that are out of align with our values,
Which may be something like checking our phone,
Doing some meaningless activity that doesn't really align with how we want to show up.
So our values are clues into how we want to use our energy.
But it's not just that that makes up your wise effort or that contributes to burnout.
Certainly when we're moving away from our values,
That can lead us to burnout.
But there's another thing that can lead us to burnout as well.
Which is our effort and our energy.
So on the y-axis,
Of your chart,
I want you to put another variable,
Which is High effort at the top.
And low effort at the bottom.
Again,
At any moment in time,
We can be putting a lot of our life force,
Our energy into something,
Even if it's our energy of our thinking,
Our rumination,
Our worry,
Our resentment.
We can also be doing low effort things.
The distinction with burnout is when you are engaging.
In high effort things.
That move you away from your values.
So I would call this top left corner.
Your burnout corner.
It's not a time management issue.
It's an energy issue.
You're putting a lot of energy into things that don't matter to you.
Now there's some other quadrants in here that I'd love for you to pay attention to.
One quadrant that also can contribute to burnout.
Is when you're putting energy into things that are low effort And.
Are low value for you,
Away from your values.
I call these not worth it activities.
And it contributes and plays into burnout because we think that it's gonna be restorative to us.
To plop on the couch and scroll on our phone or we wake up in the morning and you grab your phone to turn off your alarm and you meant to meditate,
But you end up spending the next 15 minutes that you meant meditating,
Scrolling through your Instagram.
That's low effort,
But it's away from your values and it ends up depleting you.
And when we're investing in this sort of junk food rest,
It pulls us down instead of actually energizing us.
But many of us spend a lot of time moving back and forth from doing high effort,
Low value activities,
And then low effort,
Low value activities,
Thinking that's going to restore us.
This side of this diagram I think of as unwise effort.
What's wise effort?
Why Zephyr is.
.
.
Both doing high-effort,
High-valued activities and low-effort,
High-valued activities.
So a high-effort,
High-valued activity I call a worth it move.
It's totally.
Worth it to exercise.
It's totally worth it to do your breath work.
It's totally worth it to wake up 10 minutes earlier to get in your meditation,
But it's also totally worth it to do some things like call that person that you've been putting off calling,
Even if it's uncomfortable,
But you care about them.
You need to check in.
I want you to think about what are the worth it activities for you that are aligned with how you want to show up in this world,
What you value,
What you care about,
That you want to put a little bit of effort into,
And you'll find that they are rejuvenating and revitalizing.
If you fill out that quadrant,
What would you put in it?
And then the way that we restore from the high effort,
High value activities is we do these low effort,
High value activities.
Now for some of us,
That is meditation,
But for many of us that are starting a meditation practice,
Bit of effort to get yourself on the cushion.
Some of these high-valued,
Low-effort activities may be time in nature.
It may be connecting with a friend.
It may be just taking a slow walk somewhere.
It may be pouring yourself a cup of tea.
It may be just listening to beautiful music or doing a more guided practice.
This is your Wise Effort Matrix.
I want you to fill it out for yourself and start to explore how you can live more in the worth it and this last category which I would call the savoring.
Conditions.
Moving from worth it to savoring to worth it to savoring,
You'll find that your energy gets replenished and that it'll help you move out of burnout and not worth it.
