RECOVERING FROM BURNOUT AS A CREATIVE BUSINESS OWNER
Before we get started: This post was originally shared with my email community in February 2021. Click here if you’d like to subscribe. You’ll also receive my free creative self-care planner.
Back in my therapist’s office. London’s 7am skyline is winking at me through the window. Inside our tiny room, wallpaper frays at the edges and the mismatched furniture remains unapologetic.
Today we’re talking about relationships. I explain that I’m pretty nomadic, casually reflecting that I don’t really have any friends I’ve known longer than a few years. I like to move around, both in my life and work.
My air of independence wavers as she notes her observation: that when the going gets tough, I’m more inclined to cut all ties, walk away, and start something new, than stick around to make things work.
My word for this year is “ease” and yet for these first few months of 2021, holding on to it has felt rather like taming a wild stallion. Wrangling and wrestling with unhealthy habits that’ve formed of late (mostly related to the amount of time spent on my phone), and whenever things have felt off, asking myself the same question over and over:
“How do I want my life and work to feel?”
The penny finally dropped a couple of weeks ago when I talked to Sophie Caldecott about Intuitive SEO. As we talked of the joy that comes from slowing down and creating with thoughtful intention, I realised that lately, I’ve begun to lose sight of the business I want to build.
Over the last 12 years of my photography career, I’ve come to realise that in order for my creative work to grow and flourish, in any given week or month, I need to make space and cater for three different categories of tasks:
Energising tasks (reading, learning, personal projects, self-care, listening to podcasts etc.)
Firefighting tasks (the work that affords financial stability, the shooting, editing, social media posting etc.)
Big Picture tasks (reflecting and reconnecting to my values, product/service development, lead magnet creation etc.)
It’s a delicate balancing act.
I teach this approach to my mentoring clients and above all, encourage them to do the things that fuel their creativity and keep those inspiration tanks topped up.
And I honestly thought I was practicing what I preached, until I started to burn out.
When burnout hits, it feels a little like slamming into a wall. Everything must stop. At least that’s how it feels for me. I throw my toys out of the pram and want to walk away from it all. Full and complete recovery takes a while.
When you’re doing the thing you love for a living, it’s easy to believe you can just plough into the busy work and you won’t need anything else. But more and more, I find the opposite to be true.
I believe that in order to keep loving the thing you do for a living, it's important to stay in touch with the things that inspire and nurture you as a human being.
So these past two weeks, I’ve slowed right down. I've walked more, read more, listened to more music, journaled more. I’ve got out of my head by getting back into my body. And it’s felt so right.
I’ve also ruthlessly culled my Instagram following and curated my saved collections. I’m steadily adjusting the parameters of my lane and resetting my blinkers.
I don’t know about you, but I think it’s perhaps unhelpful to allow our feeds to become one-dimensional. After a while, everything starts to look and read the same, and this in turn affects our output. Our voices begin to drop neatly, like little round pennies conforming to their slots, as we lose ourselves in the echo chambers of our own creation.
Outside interests are healthy.
I’ve stopped posting to give myself time to sit with my feelings. I’m quieting the noise that has felt overwhelming of late. I’ve unfollowed many, many photographers (I wasn’t actually seeing their work anyway) to allow more space for accounts like:
Words of Women, Vansukulele, Austin Kleon, Good Life Project, Polly Dunbar, Poetry is not a Luxury and one of my favourite’s: Norah, Rosa & Yarah.
Accounts such as these fuel the fire in my belly and remind me that I’m a living, breathing, feeling, creative being, and that I’ll never be able to fit into a single box.
Inspiration doesn’t need to come from a huge number of sources, but for someone like me (and maybe you feel the same?) there needs to be variety.
“There isn’t a work/life separation. These are all things that give me positive energy as a human. And that therefore has an impact and trickle-down effect on my work. It’s not that we can box off ‘well this is for work, and this is for me’ , because we are the same person doing all of those things. So, feed the person and you do, in a round about way, feed the work”
If the idea of redefining the way you use Instagram brings you out in a cold sweat, may what I’m about to say next bring you some comfort: I built my first two photography businesses without posting very much at all on Instagram (FYI my portfolio at suziejay.com is still live if you fancy having a peek).
Don’t get me wrong, Instagram has afforded me many great things over the past two years: a supportive community, people to buy my book, wonderful clients and opportunities to connect with incredible creatives. But when I started this latest pivot, one of my main criteria was that I could do it on my terms. And most of all, I wanted my work to fit around my life, not the other way around.
I’ve come to loathe the person I see lately in my mind's eye. Stirring the Spag Bol with my daughter tugging at my sleeves, promising her “just one more minute” for the umpteenth time as I reply to a DM or comment. And just because I need something more than motherhood in my life, it shouldn’t come at the expense of it.
So although I’m grateful for all that Instagram affords me, I’m going to be radically shifting how I use it:
While Instagram is my front door, my mailing list is my home. It’s where I feel most creative and connected, and the amount of time I spend in these areas should reflect this.
My feed needs to inspire me. I don’t just want it to just be a networking tool.
I’m going to be posting less and putting more energy into the content that brings me greater joy and works harder for me in the long run.
I don’t mean any of this to sound flippant, by the way. I fully appreciate that it’s hard to prioritise inspiration and slow growth when you need to pay the bills. But what if we could zoom out and look not to next month, but to the next five years. Do we always want to just be chasing the very next thing and serving only the work that’s right in front of us? Caught in the weeds of posting “sparkler content” - here one minute, gone the next. Or do we want to build something bigger, something that is not only profitable, but sustainable, fulfilling and joyful for decades to come? Just a thought.
These bumps in the road are never a bad thing. They’re a helpful indication that something is a little off, or we've perhaps outgrown the stage we're at. And rather than walking away, I’m learning to pause, sit with the uncomfortable feelings, reflect, and allow myself to be inspired again in the gentlest of ways. I’m taking the pressure off, and it’s working.
Suzie x
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