Episode #122: Dealing With Creative Burnout In The Toy Industry
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Have you ever wanted to throw in that towel on your toy dreams? Maybe you’ve been on the hunt for your dream toy job, or perhaps you’ve been working on developing and launching an amazing new toy idea. You might also be a new toy inventor struggling to make contact with a toy company that you have the perfect idea for. After months or years of non-stop hard work you might be feeling mentally, emotionally, and even physically exhausted. Well, before you give up on those big dreams of yours, give this podcast episode a listen.
Creative burnout happens to the best of us. The more often you tap into the creative side of your brain to design a new toy product or solve a new problem, the more likely you are to feel tapped out. In today’s episode we will reflect on Creative Burnout. We’ll start by describing what it is, how you can delay it, and what to do once it finally takes over. Find out why and how you can prepare for creative burnout and the importance of accepting and acknowledging it when it comes.
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This episode is brought to you by www.thetoycoach.com
Register for Kids Entertainer fest by clicking here.
The full article on “Context Switching” mentioned in today’s episode can be read here: blog.rescuetime.com/context-switching/
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[00:00:00] Azhelle Wade: You are listening to making it in the toy industry episode number 122.
[00:00:16] Hey, there toy people Azhelle Wade here and welcome back to another episode of the toy coach podcast, making it in the toy industry. This is a weekly podcast brought to you by thetoycoach.com. Toy people I'm so happy to be back this week. I know a last week there was a last minute switch and I couldn't do the episode. I wasn't feeling great. And ironically, the episode planed for last week was about creative burnout and I had to take some time off, but it was much needed.
[00:00:48] So tell me have you ever wanted to throw in that towel on your toy dreams? Maybe you've been hunting for toy jobs for months with no response from your dream toy companies, or maybe you've been developing a toy idea for years or thinking about developing one and either you're struggling to increase your sales or just gain some notoriety for your toy brand. Maybe you're out there looking for factories to develop your product, struggling to find them, or you're applying for all of the toy awards. You're running all the ads.
[00:01:23] And now you are just running out of gas. You can't maintain the momentum. You also might be a toy inventor, struggling to connect with a toy company that you feel you have the perfect idea for. Or maybe you're already working in the toy industry, but you're feeling overwhelmed by the day job, which you love. Now during today's episode, we're going to get a little personal, because I am going to share with you my experiences of dealing with creative overwhelm and burnout through my toy career and through this entrepreneurial journey that I've been on recently.
[00:02:01] Now I don't have all the answers, but I will share with you what has worked to help me break out of a dark heavy mental space and jump back into being creative and productive. Today's episode has been on my mind for a while to record. And I've gotta be honest. I've been a little afraid to share this episode with you. I've been a bit afraid to be this vulnerable. But if I've learned anything throughout this part of my toy journey, it's that being uncomfortable and pushing through things like this is what has led to some of my greatest moments and some pretty cool podcast episodes.
[00:02:42] So here is how today's episode is going to go down first. I'm going to talk about how to prevent or delay a feelings of overwhelm and eventual burnout. We are going to do that because in case you aren't already burned out, but you're stuck in this hustle. State of mind. Maybe you're getting things done every day. You can't stop. You won't stop. You may be headed for a major crash, but you can prevent that crash without making the quality of your work suffer. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. Then we're going to get into how to identify burnout when it's happening to you.
[00:03:20] I know you might be thinking what, of course I'll be able to identify burnout, but maybe you wont. And finally, we'll talk about what to do when you're in burnout. When you are dealing with creative burnout and you have got a lot of stuff you need to do, how can you become empowered and overcome burnout? Even if it derailed. But at the end of today's episode, I hope you don't feel alone. I hope you feel inspired to either take time off because if you are feeling overwhelmed or burned out right now, I want you to know there is a light at the end of that tunnel.
[00:03:56] And hopefully this episode will provide you with some tools and tricks to help you get there. To start off. Let's talk about how to prevent burnout. Now as someone who works a lot, I know my students, listeners of this podcast, people that slide into my DMS are always saying, Azhelle, you do so much. I know I am someone who is constantly learning. I am constantly reinventing myself, meeting people, creating products, promoting products, and I'm constantly, constantly also on the look for ways to prevent or delay the onset of creative burnout. And why is that? Because as creative people, our creativity is our most valuable asset and it has to be protected at all costs.
[00:04:52] So the best thing I ever did was to accept that creative burnout is just a part of the gig. If you want to be a creative person who was able to burn that candle at both ends work themselves super hard because you believe that gets the best quality of work out of you, that it drives the company you work for the furthest forward, or that it drives the company that you run as far as you need it to go. Well, you can be sure that if you do that, your candle is going to burn it. And over the past couple of years, as an entrepreneur, I've learned some methods to prevent and delay that burnout.
[00:05:36] Now, of course there were burnout issues when I worked full time, but there are some sort of built in fail saves. When you work full time that when you switch to entrepreneurship, you forget how to utilize or create those kinds of scale saves in your own. So the number one thing you need to do to avoid burnout, whether you're an entrepreneur or whether you work, the corporate toy world is to plan for it. That's right. You've got a plan for burnout. When you work in the corporate toy, You have a certain number of days off PTO, right? However you use it sick days, vacation days, whatever.
[00:06:20] But because you have this predetermined amount of time, you typically plan for it, or your company actually has built in times of the year where the office is closed for certain holidays built in PTO. So vacation and celebrations. Now it's a running joke in my relationship that I am always planning a vacation somewhere or celebrating something. I will turn anything into a vacation. If it's a trip to Oklahoma for speaking of. I'm turning it into a mini getaway. If I booked a segment on TV, I'm going to make some cookies to celebrate.
[00:07:02] If my segment air today, we're going to go grab a drink to celebrate that. And what I thought was just kind of, my haphazard way of celebrating the small wins in life, I realized that these desires to celebrate achievements and to plan vacations actually were tools to delay burnout. So plan strategically, these vacations and celebrations can work wonders, but haphazardly positioned around your professional calendar. They can wreak havoc. I know all too well about planning a vacation during a, not so opportune time of my professional calendar.
[00:07:50] An example of a bad time to plan a vacation that I have done in the past is just before beginning a new group of toy creators academy students. Often I liked to launch toy creators academy in September. And my birthday happens to fall at the end of August. And because of that, I would often have a little getaway planned for my birthday, which would mean that the process of welcoming students into the program toy creators academy would fall kind of on my vacation or just after my vacation. It was just the absolute worst timing.
[00:08:32] Haphazard positioning of this vacation time, actually brought a lot more stress and havoc on the backend of a vacation and really doesn't allow the vacation to do what it's supposed to do to prevent this burnout. Now planning a vacation or a celebration is still a tool I use today to prevent creative burnout, but I'm just a little bit more strategic and careful about how I use it. And it is just the first step in order to feel truly re-energized inspired and uplifted after taking a break, whether that break is an extended vacation or a weekend vacay or just a few hours out with your friends.
[00:09:20] You've got a plan all around it. You've got a plan. What is going to get done before you leave? You've got a plan. What is going to be done while you're gone? Whether that means somebody else's doing it, or you've automated a system to do it while you're gone. And then you've got to plan for what is going to get done right after you get back. And again, right after you get back. You might still have somebody else doing the work for you, or you might have an automated system completing the work for you.
[00:09:49] But the point is to really make the most of time off like this that is intended to alleviate or prevent creative burnout. You've actually got a plan. For the time, right before the time off the time during the time off and the time, right after the time off, otherwise you can get overwhelmed with stress at any of those points and reduce the effectiveness of the vacation or this celebration or the getaway. Before I leave for vacation, I go into full on batch work mode.
[00:10:27] What is batch work mode? Well, I look ahead in my calendar and I complete work in advance for the week before I leave the time that I will be gone and the week that I return. So I even make sure that I have a clear to-do list set for when I get back and I do that so that when I get back, I do not have to plan that the plan is set for me. And all I have to do is take small actions, which allows me to ease back into the workflow. The process of setting small tasks for yourself, when you come back from time off is as simple as, setting due dates and a project management tool, or sending yourself automated emails that come to you or send work back to you when you're ready to deal with it so that you kick right into action when you return.
[00:11:17] And it doesn't feel as though you've lost control over your work or your calendar or your business, while you've been gone. Now to plan a for creative burnout, you've got to expect yourself to burn out. And I know that's a hard pill to swallow. These days there's this whole mantra against hustle culture against that burnout. And I do believe though, for creative people, it is inevitable. If you throw yourself into your work creatively day in and day out, it is inevitable that we will feel. And it is better for us to get honest and to accept the fact that there are cycles of burnout in our career. It just, it is what it is.
[00:12:11] We have to get really honest about the work that we do every day, every week and every month, and look at ourselves and say, yeah, after about three days of coming up with brand new ideas and sketching them and pitching them, I'm going to be. Really tired. I'm going to be mentally exhausted. I'm going to feel physically drained. So I'm going to need to do something to replenish that. the worst thing that we can do is pretend that spreading out the time that we spend coming up with ideas instead of three days back to back, that we sprinkle those three days into, let's say a full week, right?
[00:12:55] We're doing ourselves as creatives, a disservice. If we pretend like spreading out that creativity is means that we're actually using any less energy, it's not true for creatives for a lot of us, not only do we have to use the same amount of energy, because we're still doing the same amount of work. Sometimes it takes more energy to spread a project out over a longer period of time. Because there is this kind of creative ramp up process that we have to go through where we have to get into the mindset where we have to look at our customers, where we have to look at the market where we have to look at what our bosses want or what our client wants, put all that together.
[00:13:39] There is this term called context switching that I read about a while ago. And it's all about why jumping between different tasks actually hurts your productivity. So where some people might say, oh you know, I have this one project and I can work on it all week so that I won't overstress myself. Context switching, according to psychologists, Gerald Weinberg. Every extra task that you do in between your main tasks. So if your main task is doing a plan drawing of a toy design, every extra task you do in between that plan, drawing of a toy design costs you 20 to 80% of your overall productivity, just by switching tasks for a short amount of time.
[00:14:32] Essentially context switching is what we call multitasking. But the problem is that we're forcing our brains to switch from one way of thinking to another. And while we think we are accomplishing more things in less time, we're actually taking more time to do less things. You know, aside from, you know, time is a finite resource. We don't have a lot of it. We don't want to waste it, but also that takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of emotional energy, mental energy for us creatives, it's emotional and sometimes physical energy. So why would we want to expend that extra energy?
[00:15:11] But if we do, we actually have to be aware that we are just driving ourselves to creative burnout faster. So get really honest with yourself, look at the tasks you're doing. Look at the tasks you have planned to do tomorrow the next day, and really think about it. How are you really going to feel after three days of back-to-back meetings from 12:00 PM to 6:00 PM? How are you really going to feel? Are you going to be so tired that you were going to need one day of no meetings where you're just deep in your emails to.
[00:15:48] Are you going to need that day so that you can rest and recharge that the following day you are not completely burnt out. What is burnout? You know, I love to answer any questions like that with a good old dictionary definition. So let's get into it. According to the Oxford dictionary. Burnout is the quote reduction of a fuel or substance to nothing through use or combustion. So burnout is the reduction to nothing. If you're anything like me, you might have a hard time identifying. When burnout is actually happening to you, creative burnout.
[00:16:31] Now, in fact, you may have found yourself in a situation where other people like your friends or your family might be identifying your own creative burnout even before you have, but what does this social term for burnout really mean? How do you know if you're experienced? Well, burnout is sometimes described as the feeling of being just completely and utterly exhausted when you feel spent emotionally and physically and mentally that they say is burning. It's the feeling that you've got no more energy.
[00:17:09] You want to do the thing you really want to, but you just feel almost like you can't, if you're feeling burned out, you might find yourself saying, I just, I can't do this today. And then today turned into tomorrow and tomorrow you say, I can't do this right. You might find yourself saying, I just don't have the energy to work as hard as I once used to, or you might even find yourself saying, you know, I'm not sure I enjoy this work at all anymore. During a period of burnout, you could look back at your previous achievements and think, wow, how in the world did I do all that? Who had all that energy? That wasn't me? Well, my friend, I'm here to tell you, you did that.
[00:17:53] You did, you generated that energy. You did that thing and you can do it again. The very first step to getting over where you might be right now in creative burnout is to accept that you're in the midst of it that you're just experiencing burnout. That's it? It's not a crisis of identity. It's not a crisis of career choice. Your essentially creatively tired. I remember chatting with a friend a little while ago, and we were talking about this very topic, right? We're talking about burnout and she and I were reminiscing about the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur, laughing about how we overcame such hard times.
[00:18:39] We're going back and forth expressing our feelings, both of us, very proud to not be going through burnout at that very moment. And instead to be super productive in our businesses. But at some point I went off on a tangent about how I just can't seem to find the energy to do some of the things I once did in my business. That I actually, I find myself looking back and wondering, how did I have the energy to take on so many clients? How did I have energy to build out content every single day? And my friend got really quiet and she stares at me and she said, well, a shell that's burnout.
[00:19:23] And I felt so embarrassed. I felt so silly. Let me tell you something. I probably turned red because we, there we were, we were talking about how we'd actually taken control of burnout. And I believed it. I really did. I was like, I am balancing my work life. I'm doing really good. And in that moment of her comment, I realized that I was actually still dealing with burnout and I said, oh, you are right. This still is burnout. So what do you. Once you figure out that you are experiencing burnout, whether you identify it by yourself or a trusted friend or a family member identifies it for you, what are you going to do next?
[00:20:12] And you know, you already know you are deep in burnout, but you are also deep in a busy season at your job in your business or within your side gig. And all you can think is I don't have time for this. I don't have time to deal with this. When you are overwhelmed with work and you are deep in burnout, I know your first instinct, especially if you are a hustle, culture type person is to just push through and push through really hard, because eventually you're thinking it'll be the weekend and I'll have time to kind of break and just reset.
[00:20:54] But. Let's be real. If you are really, a workaholic and you're deep in this burnout, a few weekends may have already come and gone and this feeling of overwhelm may have stayed. So obviously that plan isn't working, what can possibly work for you in this situation? There are a couple of things you can do one one, if you are an entrepreneurial. This is when you need to hire out some help. It's not the best time to hire help when you are overwhelmed and overstressed and under tight deadlines. But if you are an entrepreneur and if you are the creative mind behind your business, it is imperative that you protect your creative mind at all costs.
[00:21:38] It may be a bit beyond your budget. You may have to take on some extra projects in the future to make up for it. But it is always worth it to hire a little extra help to get you through a rough patch so that you don't fall behind in your schedule and you don't fall any deeper into a burnout. If you are working full-time if you're working corporate and you're like, oh, I can't actually hire anybody. What else can I do? Depending on your position, you may have the opportunity to switch some work around, but honestly, at some point you're going to have to take some time to yourself. And I'm sorry to tell you this, but do nothing.
[00:22:24] That means you have got to book that paid time. That PTO, if you're working in corporate, if you are an entrepreneur, you've got to intentionally block your calendar off from anyone booking any meetings, how much time you need off is going to directly correlate to how long you've been feeling the burnout. For me. It's one week to every two months that I've been dealing with creative burnout, a good week of doing like nothing is really going to help me get over that creative burnout. And I know it is a ton of time and taking off that amount of time may seem counterproductive, you may be thinking I have so much to do.
[00:23:11] I can not take this time, but trust me when I say. If you've been trying to power through creative burnout for too long, whatever you output during this burnout period will not hold a candle to the quality and the speed at which you can output work once you give yourself time to rest. So block that time as soon as possible. If you're feeling the burnout, now start tomorrow. And likely it may not be. And maybe it will just be one day that you need, maybe it will be three days that you need. Maybe it will be seven days that you need. Sometimes the creative burnout can be so bad. You just need to relax until you are burned out of relaxing.
[00:24:00] This time the, you are taking it's me time and it is imperative that you steal some for yourself in what ever form it is available to you in your life right now. This practice of figuring out who can fill your shoes for one day, three days, seven days, who can pick up the pieces while you're gone. This is one of the biggest lessons that you will learn through the process of dealing with and overcoming creative burnout. Finding the person who you can trust with your client work or finding the person that you can trust to take a look at the projects you have on your calendar, in your corporate job, and make sure that things stay on track while you're gone.
[00:24:48] That person is going to be your buffer that will allow you to take a few hours off when you need them so that you can prevent creative burnout or delay creative burnout in the future, until you can plan a proper rest and a proper vacation within within your workspace. Okay. So let's say you found the time you blocked your calendar. You took the PTs. What do you do with it? Well, I like to say this quote that I got from a favorite YouTube yoga teacher that I follow, she says, find what feels good. So yes. Find what feels good is a quote. Yoga with Adrian. Her name is Adrian.
[00:25:38] It's a YouTube channel. If you are into doing yoga at home, or you're curious, on checking it out, trying some yoga at home for the first time. She's a lovely teacher, great videos, things for beginners and things for people looking to challenge themselves. But Adrian's mantra of finding what feels good is the mantra that I live for during my me time. And while I was out sick, it was the mantra I had to remind myself whenever I started to feel guilty about not working, find what feels. Now my most recent me time, it was forced on me after I was getting sick with COVID. Right.
[00:26:19] I just sat on my couch, and the most important thing for you to do during your me time is to just not judge yourself. You know, if you want to sit there and you want to watch TV, cool. But if you want to go for a walk around the block, great. During me time, your goal should be to completely flip the switch from all work, no play to all play, no work. The less you work during your meetings. The faster you are going to recover from that burnout. Try and pay attention to what feels good during your me time. Write it down. If you don't have a great memory, are you finding yourself enjoying chocolate bars? Are you enjoying watching romcom movies? You thought you hate it. Are you really loving this new book from your favorite?
[00:27:13] Take notes of these things, because these are tools that you can use to avoid burnout in the future to delay it in the future, but also to overcome it in the future. It is so important to know what tools can help you come from a really tapped out place. Like you just feel like you poured your entire cup out into the world and you've got nothing left to give. You need to know what fills your cup back up. So pay attention, even in this state of burnout and the state of meantime, we're learning, you're learning about yourself. What do you love? What do you like? What do you not like? What stresses you out? You want to give yourself more of the good stuff? Find what feels good and just push away the bad until your cup is filled back up.
[00:28:02] Now during my toy career, I often would remember planning vacations for the year and often having to work around toy trade shows and events. You don't want to take a vacation right before a major trade show, because you're know, you know, you're going to be stressed out, worrying about it. And then sometimes you don't want to take that vacation directly after the trade show because everyone might be taking the same time off. So what's important to do in your corporate career and in your, if you have your own toy business is to look at your annual calendar.
[00:28:40] Look at your busy seasons in your personal life, in your professional life and plan for vacations and plan for celebrations. And in your mind, in the back of your mind, those vacations and those celebrations should be planned for when you are kind of right before a burnout. So you're feeling stressed out. You're feeling overwhelmed. You're feeling like you have too many thoughts in your head to get things done. That is when you should be planning time off when you should be planning that vacation or that celebration to get your me time, we have got to get so much better about intentionally planning this time and designing our careers and our work lives so that we are preparing for a burnout instead of just reacting to one.
[00:29:34] I know you might think like, oh, that sounds negative. Like, I don't want to prepare for a burnout. We are creative people. We are constantly giving our creativity to the world. Right. We cannot expect that we should be able to continue to give, give, give, without expecting anything to come back in. So we plan for the burnout. We plan. We need to start planning for our cups to be empty so that when it's almost empty, we say, oh, no, no, no. I know exactly what shows I need. I know exactly what city I need to travel to what book I need to read, what podcast I need to listen to, to fill my cup up. And we need to make sure that we don't just allow ourselves an hour here an hour there to do that.
[00:30:19] Sometimes if we haven't given ourselves that time to refill our cup for a month, for two months, we might need we might need a perscription of me time. We might. Full days of me time, we might need to create, ate a safe space for our creativity to refresh and revitalize and refuel. I was talking to a friend a few weeks ago who said to me, if you ever feel stressed out in your business and you think you can't go on. Take a vacation like, and it is so true, but we can actually do better than that. We can, before we get to the point where, you know, we're feeling like we can go on in our career or in our business, we should be planning the vacation because we already know we're, self-aware highly intelligent human beings.
[00:31:12] We know what we can take emotionally. We know what we can take mentally and we can prepare for it. Before I jump into my summary of today's episode, I'd like to take a quick break and give a shout out to Buster balloon Caldwell and his kids entertainment Fest, which is happening on May 4th, the kids. Entertainer Fest is a 100% online virtual event to inspire excite, educate and empower performers who entertained kids and families. This event is dedicated to the discussions and the real work of becoming a better and more successful children's entertainer.
[00:31:55] So to grab the link, head over to the toy coach.com/ 1 22, I'm going to have the link to where you can register for that event. It's a great event I spoke at it last year. I would love for you guys to check it out today, we talked about feelings of overwhelm and creative burnout. We talked about the importance of your creativity, why you need to protect it and what you need to do to start doing that. We also talked about how to identify when burnout is happening to you, because I know it can be difficult to realize when you might be struggling with burnout.
[00:32:33] You might just think like, oh no, I'm just being lazy. Or, oh, no, I just can't achieve as much as I once did, but you, my friend might just be dealing with burnout. We also recognize today that there are major lessons that can be learned during a creative burnout. And they're not the cliche lessons you might expect me to say, or you might have heard before, like hustle culture is dead. Don't push yourself, all that stuff. No, but the lesson I want you to take from burnout. It's okay to feel burned out once in a while. I want us to start seeing creative burnout as the end of a cycle. As we near it, as we get there, it's just time for a reset, just time for a rest.
[00:33:16] Just like if we were tired at the end of a day, we sleep. And then we started. When we are starting to feel creatively, burned out, we should feel as justified as if we are tired. We should feel justified to pause, take a break from working and reset creatively. I also want you to pay attention when you're feeling burned out and when you're in that process of recovery, that meantime, that me time, I want you to pay attention to. Feels good so that you can repeat it and give yourself more of that during your future. Mean times to recover from other creative burnout when you return from a vacation or a celebratory break and you actually feel.
[00:34:06] Or energized. You also should be taking notice of how your everyday tasks affect you. Because once you come back in that refresh state of mind to your life, you might discover something. Early morning meetings may be the best because you have energy, but it might not actually be the best for your energy because they leave you feeling drained so early in the day, you might also find that maybe you're super creative in the morning and you have a lot of ideas, but you don't actually. Execute on those ideas until later in the day until the afternoon. So don't be afraid to change up the order in which you get things done during your work day.
[00:34:52] It's okay to learn from a vacation or time off what actually feels good once you find what feels good. Don't ignore it. Use it to restructure or redesign the work style that works best for you doing so can also help you prevent creative burnout from knocking you off of your feet. By helping you manage your levels of mental. Emotional and physical drain. As always. Thank you so much for spending this time with me today. I know your time is valuable and that there are a ton of podcasts out there. So it means the world to me that you tune into this one. Until next week, I'll see you later toy people.
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