The Secret to Avoiding Burnout That Every High Achiever Needs to Know - With Erin Harrington

Thinking Big: Mindset, Habits, and Hacks

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In this episode, Sean interviews Erin Harrington about improving work effectiveness and reducing burnout, especially for high achievers and entrepreneurs. Erin shares her own experience dealing with medical conditions that caused constant fight-or-flight responses, and how she learned to manage stress to improve her happiness and well-being.

Key Points:

• High achievers often believe working harder leads to more success, but burnout occurs when grinding too many hours without self-care. This leads to health issues, brain fog, and ineffectiveness.
• Stress and negative emotions like fear originate in the amygdala part of the brain. The amygdala can't differentiate between minor and major stressors, triggering fight-or-flight responses.
• Erin found that stress reduction activities like walking in nature, cooking, and socializing helped reduce her neurological symptoms, even as her diagnoses worsened. Small positive actions practiced consistently can reduce chronic disease, improve relationships and efficiency.
• Stress is a choice and there are simple tools to train your brain to have a more positive, resilient response to stressors. It takes practice but is very doable.
• Erin created The Whole Life Planner based on the tools she developed over nearly 20 years to retrain her own brain. It focuses on aligning with values, self-care, goal-setting, positive habits and resilience rather than just productivity.
• The planner has reflection questions like identifying a daily "win" no matter how small. It aims to help people be more productive, peaceful, purposeful and resilient.
• Consistently practicing small positive actions is key. The brain craves this consistency and it leads to more positive outcomes and well-being.
• The "dump zone" in the planner is for jotting down ideas, to-dos, and thoughts that come up during the day, so you don't get sidetracked from the main priorities.
• Erin offers a free Life-at-a-Glance Assessment at soulvalues.com/promo to help identify areas of life that may need more attention and rebalancing. She recommends retaking it quarterly or when feeling very unbalanced.

Resources:

• The Whole Life Planner by Erin Harrington
• Life-at-a-Glance Assessment: soulvalues.com/promo
• Erin's website: soulvalues.com

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