Real estate is the domain of highly-driven, internally-motivated, often Type-A personalities. The most successful agents are powered by long-standing routines. Some rely on daily role-playing sessions with like-minded peers. Others stick to a schedule that has them on the phone during the same hours every day, prospecting expireds or FSBOs through their Espresso Agent CRM and dialer platform.
But things have been turned upside down over the past months. The unprecedented disruption to our personal and professional lives created by the COVID-19 pandemic has added a layer of uncertainty and stress most of us could have never imagined. Such stress is only heightened if you’re the kind of person who obsessively watches 24-hour cable news coverage or scrolls through your social media feeds for hours on end. The news isn’t good, and only serves to create more fear and doubt.
Of course, on the business end, you might be finding that prospects, homeowners who just a few months ago had an urgency to either buy or sell, are now hesitant because they’re watching the same gloomy news reports as you are.
Suddenly, things might begin to feel differently for you:
If you’re experiencing any, or a combination of these feelings, you’re not alone. More and more people are in the same boat, which we commonly refer to as burnout. Burnout is real. Psychology Today says this about burnout:
Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and often physical exhaustion brought on by prolonged or repeated stress. Though it’s most often caused by problems at work, it can also appear in other areas of life, such as parenting, caretaking, or romantic relationships.
Nearly 70 percent of full-time working Americans said they felt burned out in their current job, according to a 2018 Gallup survey. For nearly 25 percent of those surveyed, these feelings of being burned out happened on a regular basis.
The World Health Organization, in a 2019 report, recognized occupational burnout as “a syndrome related to chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
Remember, all of these (and many similar) studies and surveys were done before the onset of COVID-19. As many of us are learning, life in a pandemic is often a cycle of increased stress with regard to parenting, caregiving and our romantic relationships. And, of course, most of us are having to work from home, which is not that uncommon for real estate agents. What is uncommon is having to adjust our work-from-home routines to accommodate the presence of our families.
So, given all of these circumstances, it’s likely that you might feel some degree of burnout. And even though the country is slowly emerging from required lock-down, we are all, to a certain level, going to deal with some form of COVID-19 disruption for some time to come. Thus, exacerbating the chance of experiencing burnout.
Given all of these factors, many business professionals are starting to consider mini-sabbaticals, mental health days as a way to combat burnout. A mental health, or sabbatical day can be impulsive (“I think I’ll call in sick today”) or planned weeks in advance. Either way, the idea is to take a day to fully focus on your inner self in order to bring some balance to your life.
Effective mini-sabbaticals can work magic in a number of different ways:
Your sabbatical day should be a time for taking care of yourself, mentally, spiritually and physically. To that end, you’ll want to avoid:
You can begin to attack burnout before your mental health day by:
Whether impulsively, or planned in advance, how can you maximize your personal day, or mini-sabbatical? Here are a few tips:
A mini-sabbatical or mental health day can rejuvenate you, emotionally, mentally and physically. And, it may go a long way toward disrupting the patterns that often result in burnout. Take a sabbatical day. You deserve it.
Doug Spak joined Espresso Agent as a Content Marketing Specialist in 2016. Doug brings nearly four decades of experience as a copywriter, blogger, and screenwriter to his role with Espresso. Since joining our team, Doug has actively updated website content, published more than 300 blogs, and created countless social media posts.
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