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My writer acquaintance Mary became a NY times best seller at age 40. Watching from across the internet, she seemed like one of the most expressive and creative people I have ever known. She was an illustrator, musician, and writer. Her life looked like one big explosion of creative joy. In passing at a writer’s conference recently, I heard her speak about how she was experiencing something akin to writer’s block. She shared that honestly writer’s block was too extreme a term. It was less of a block and more a subtle snuffing out of some flame. It was more like the calling to make something, anything, was just gone. Another term that Mary said people were throwing around for what she was experiencing was burn out. And this too felt wrong to her. Don’t people who experience burn out suffer from some extreme exhaustion? She didn’t feel exhausted. She felt blank, bored, boring.
This podcast is for Mary
It’s for anyone like her, who may be suffering from some inexplicable malaise
It’s for artists who feel the need to protect their creative impulse like a flame in the wind
This show is for anyone looking to debunk that “tortured artist” stereotype, for those who want to believe that the creative life can bring us deep satisfaction, healing, and even joy. I’m so glad you’re here.
I’m Merideth Hite Estevez, and this is Artists for joy the podcast
SHORT MUSIC BREAK
each week I will share stories of artists seeking joy… We’ll explore how so many travelers along this the artist’s way have left us bread crumbs—wisdom and inspiration that can help us stay joyful on the journey.
This week on the podcast, a frequently requested topic: burn out. What is it? How do you keep it from happening? And how do you bounce back? I’ll share a story of my biggest burn out moment in my career, plus I’ll share Mary’s remedy for all that ailed her. 3 tools or frameworks to consider for reducing or recovering from burnout, with a fun twist. And I’ll give you something to consider this week. But first here’s some more music.
I didn’t know it at the time, but at my first teaching job I set myself up for a huge creative crash. Burn out you might call it. My first two teaching jobs honestly. It took me so long to learn this lesson. My overfunctioning came from a good place, as it so often does…my desire to help students, or maybe the less virtuous need to impress people, who knows why else. It showed itself in a lot of ways: the main one being: I led a 7:00AM warm up class for all woodwind students every single day that school was in session. It wasn’t part of my course load, I wasn’t being compensated for it. I just knew early morning warm up was important and I knew it would help students to learn how to practice fundamentals. And in my mind “Someone had to do it.” (martydom complex amiright??) At the time, I was single with no children, I lived alone, and looking back it was shocking how easy it was to burn all the ends of the candle at once, and shocking that I perceived that it was expected of me (by whom besides myself,I am still not sure) and the 7AM warm up was really only the beginning. Answering emails all hours of the day and night. Taking my students' issues home with me, absorbing the stress of my colleagues and supervisors to the point it was hard to sleep or even take time off. I had headaches and neck pain that I couldn’t explain.
And the symptoms of this kind of overwork were more than physical, I had this deep spiritual numbness, confusion, doubt, insecurity and listlessness. I thought that if I worked hard enough and was excellent enough at my job then I would receive accolades and love and then I’d recover my creative joy for music in the process. Not surprisingly, I was seriously wrong. I hit a type of rock bottom creatively, and realized I couldn’t do it anymore, so I left my full time teaching job in higher ed, in search of rest or healing or something I couldn’t quite pinpoint. As I quit I fell into a spiral of shame, believed I had failed, wondered if my quote unquote career would ever recover. But the gift of my burnout as an educator was when the smoke cleared, I was able to started working through Julia Cameron’s book the artist’s way and it was the beginning of a powerful shift towards creative recovery.
Burnout can manifest itself in a couple of different ways, I’ve learned through my coaching practice. It can look like overfunctioning OR underfunctioning. It can show up as procrastination, an inability to focus, general malaise or listlessness, or it can look like manic productive energy, feelings of needing to save everyone, followed by a deep sense of emptiness when you achieve a long sought after goal.
Since my teaching days, I have worked hard to develop practical skills and tools for myself to avoid burnout again, to stay connected to my joy for making music and even teaching people things. And so I have 3 preventative measures to avoid burnout or if you are already feeling burnt out you I believe these 3 tools will help you right the ship, blow out the ends of the candle and help you find some sustainable, healthy relationship to your creative work.
If you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while you know my unabashed love for metaphors, especially musical ones, and so each of these 3 tools or frameworks to help with burn out has a musical metaphor attached. And if you aren’t a music person, don’t worry, I’ll explain everything.
The first tool for burnout is expectation…
Expectation is like the key signature of your creative life. The key signature is found at the top left corner of the music and it literally sets the tone for an entire movement. If there is a b flat in the key signature you can expect that every b is hitherto flat unless otherwise noted. I think where so many of us go wrong and end up burnt out is when we do not set our and others expectations accordingly. If you are a visual artist for example, who is selling your work at a holiday craft market or something, what can you expect from the situation? Before you walk into an opportunity like that, set yourself up for success by naming…what you are expecting, what you would like to happen, find out what you can control and release the rest. Are these expectations reasonable? Do you agree to them? Think long and hard about them, even simple ones. Name how you want to show up. How you want to be with others. Any musician will tell you that the key signature which outlines a certain scale a piece will be based on, it functions as a shorthand. It communicates a lot so that you are not reading every single note in every single measure but you’re able to zoom out and look for patterns. And even predict what is ahead in some cases. Naming your expectations is like that. It allows you to connect what is most important about something and make decisions from your deep core values. Sure somethings will catch you off guard like a pesky sharp 4 but that’s likely secondary dominant (ignore the music terms if you don’t know what that means) but setting up your expectations with yourself and others in your life helps you avoid burn out because it is clear for everyone involved what is required, expected, or needed. If you end up giving way more than was initially expected, then an alarm should go off in your head. You will know that you are operating outside of the key signature and doing that too long and you’ll wind up in a chromatic soup where you have no idea where home base is. With my teaching example, I set everyone up to expect an email response from me immediately. My students and more importantly myself, we all expected me to be there to warm up with him everyday, and it was a very hard pattern to break free from. I felt like I failed because of my own expectations. I had no choice but to crash and burn. Naming your expectations to yourself and others, is like settling into a familiar key signature, it makes playing the music easier because you know where you are heading.
The second tool is a close cousin to expectation and that is boundaries. Boundaries are like the bar lines of your creative life. Bar lines are the little lines that make boxes within music that makes the music digestible and organized in an again predictable way. In common time, where there are 4 beats per measure, every single bar will include 4 beats and a bar line is there to remind you. It is clear where each group of 4 starts and finishes, and while I’m going to try to avoid giving an entire lecture in music history, there is actually a hierarchy of beats within the bar. The boundary of the bar line communicates which notes are important and which ones are less important. See how boundaries and expectations go together? Boundaries are the tool you use to rein yourself back in when expectations have not been met or even completely ignored. Just like expectations work best when they are communicated beforehand, boundaries are handled much better when folks can sense the lines you draw as serious, important, and worthy of respect. When you’re open upfront and clear about the line. When my student was late to their lesson, I should have set a boundary and not allowed them to have a lesson that day. Instead I allowed them to come late and made up the half hour they missed at another time, which ate into my free time. Now, occasionally doing that and bending over backwards to go above and beyond what is expected of you, look, that’s occasionally fine. But beware friends, never setting the boundary and over and over and over going above and beyond the expected, it will burn you out. Setting boundaries is so hard, trust me, this is not my strong suit even now. But you know what is way harder? Being so burnt out you can’t do your job at all anymore. If you are in a position where you are around others who carry a lot of stress or have experienced trauma, being compassionate does not mean absorbing all of their intense emotions. In coaching training I learned the phrase—Observe, do not absorb. This might seem cold to you but it is actually kind because it allows you to avoid compassion fatigue. To be with people in their pain but setting a boundary around absorbing their suffering keeps you in the game longer instead of being completely sidelined due to burn out. Boundaries are actually kind if you think about it.
Because they feed right back into managing expectations. And it teaches others that they are safe and loved as they set boundaries too. You can expect that there will be a boundary set after each set of 4 beats, the music communicates a lot for you, you fall into a manageable rhythm. Setting boundaries gets easier when you see how it serves you and everyone in your life. And by the way there is a special type of bar line called a double bar at the end of a movement or piece of music and that assures everyone that they aren’t missing a page, that it’s really the end. So How clear are your boundaries around endings? Getting stronger with leaving toxic relationships, work environments, mindsets, setting expectations and following through, using clear boundaries throughout the process, if helps us end things well when needed, if helps us not get burnt out.
And the final tool I have for you for burn out is rest. And there are all kinds of rests in music aren’t there? Eighth, quarter, half, and whole rests. Mozart said “the music is not in the music but the silence between.” What if rest were not only relaxing, vegging, letting go, but what if you saw it as something as important as the creative work itself. In orchestra when your instrument is not needed in a particular movement, when you are asked to rest while others play it is marked with the word “tacit” and how interesting to me that the non musical definition of tacit means “understood or implied without being stated” like a “tacit agreement” etc. in other words, when we are tacit we communicate things with ourselves and others. It’s the ultimate boundary, to put down the oboe, the pen, the brush, and accept your limits, heal where you need healing, restore and renew your creative impulse. Rest is not something you have to earn, my friends. It is absolutely a central key in avoiding burn out. It’s where the music is. If you skip or rush the rests the music's rhythm will be completely off. And so will your rhythm as a creator. Mind the key signature, the expectations set by you and others, use the boundaries of bar lines to clearly denote where you end and the work begins. And lastly, rest. Rest in whatever ways feel restorative to you, but listen for all that is being said in the tacit moments.
Mary, my Writer friend decided the only way forward from her state was to take what she called a sacred pause. She didn’t start any new projects, she walked longer and more often, she waited it out. She read when she felt like it, but didn’t fake enthusiasm for what was next. She listened closely to what she believed she was supposed to hear and she got some sleep. She told me that she was resistant to calling it burn out at first because she hadn’t felt like she’d actually worked that hard. Sure launching a book was a lot but it was her dream! She had had very labor intensive jobs in the past that left her so physically and emotionally exhausted after 12 hour days that writing books felt like a luxury, and how horrible to complain as a ny times best seller that you feel overwhelmed or burnout how ungrateful. Friends, your feelings don’t need justification. What if the symptoms in your creative life…so feeling blocked, uninspired, bored, disinterested suddenly…what if they are trying to communicate an important message to you? If you’ll call it burn out or not, just know that your creative impulse is not some wind up toy that plays the same song on command. Creativity is a spiritual practice, and so of course you need to approach the maintenance and sustainability of it through doing the personal spiritual work. No one else is going to do that for you. Not your boss, your agent, your partner, your audience member or reader. You are the spiritual director of your creative life and so the work of managing expectations, boundaries, and rest are up to you alone. Last time I checked Mary is still inside the sacred pause, and I love that name so much. And of course, she’s been writing about it and I find those words some of her most beautiful and honest yet.
I eventually did go back to teaching, and when I started setting more boundaries I was able to explore other mediums, and eventually decided full time teaching was not for me at this juncture. If I had been monitoring my expectations and boundaries more back in my first few teaching jobs, I might have learned this about myself sooner. Like a child’s tantrum, sometimes our creative selves will rebel until we listen. I’m not really sure honestly, no way to know. But what I do know is that my perfectionism, quote unquote commitment to excellence, fear, shame around letting teaching go, not sure what else– these had been cacophonous noise that kept me from hearing some truer music from deep within. So what if burn out could be a call to some KEY change that you need to make? Will you listen?
I’ll be right back
Today’s listener question is from an direct message on instagram. They asked, hi meredith I love your podcast for many reasons but especially because of the way you use music and sound. I truly don’t know any show like it, most podcasts are people talking or interviewing and they are great too, but your show is like a whole new category of audio experience. I am wondering what inspired you to make something like that, how did you learn how to craft something like that? I am a writer and actor and I would love to synthesize my love of theater with a solo show podcast but I don’t know how to do that. The way your show does that with music makes hopeful that its possible. Do you have any shows that you know of that have done this? Any tips for how to think about this? Thanks for inspiring me and keep up the good work! –
Actor/podcaster in the Adirondacks
Aww thank you so much for these kind words. I really appreciate that. First of all it makes me feel really seen because this is truly my favorite part about podcasting. Create little audio worlds for people to listen to, a radio essay that takes them inside my mind a little bit but also helps them relax, reflect and hopefully be encouraged.
So first, this question of what inspired me…pretty much all of NPR. HAHAHA I am a big fan of the podcast radiolab and this american life. Radiolab especially was originally created by a guy who was a composer and so if you listen to some of the early episodes especially, the sound design is a WORK OF ART. It was through that show that I guess I realized that podcasts can be an art in and of themselves, and the storytelling of This American Life really inspired me too. The writing in all of these shows has had a huge impact on my writing style, especially writing for the podcast. So, those are two shows I would recommend you listen to FOR SURE because of their sound design alone.
As far as expressing yourself as an actor through your own show, I would encourage you to find shows out there that do it well. There are radio dramas out there, storytelling shows that feature dramatic readings of monologues, etc. Do market research and don’t be afraid to listen to really old stuff, see everything you hear as research, even if it isn’t about theater and acting.
However, don’t get overwhelmed by all the options and all the other voices in your ear buds. Spend some time reflecting about how you want your listener to feel when they listen. What outcome do you want them to experience? Ask the question that almost everyone asks when they purchase something or hit play on a free offering…what is in it for me? How do you want to serve your listener? Start there, and don’t be afraid to get started because you will learn so much as you go. Don’t wait for everything to be perfect before you hit publish, there is power in taking action, so do the research but don’t let it paralyze you from getting going. And when you do send me the show so I can listen and share.
Thanks so much for that question. And this answer goes for any genre you are considering exploring, maybe for you its a book or a musical composition or work of visual art and you are worried that the stage is too crowded or everything has already been said…you have something unique to offer, something only you can give, and so there is always room for you to step out here and be yourself. Don’t let the fear stop you. If you have a questions or creative conundrum that you’d like me to answer on the show, click the link in the show notes or email me artistsforjoypod at gmail.com
Now for todays’ coda
Anyone who has started a campfire knows about the fire triangle. Three things must be present at the same time for a fire to happen. Oxygen…which helps sustain combustion, heat…which raises the material to ignition temperature, and some sort of fuel or combustible material. Take any of these 3 things away and you will no longer have a fire. Reading up on fire safety this week I learned that the basics involve keeping the fuel sources and combustible materials separate and under control at all costs. When these three elements come together, Once a fire has started, the resulting exothermic chain reaction sustains the fire and allows it to continue until or unless at least one of the elements of the fire is blocked. Foam or a fire blanket suffocate the fire restricting it’s oxygen, Water lowers the temperature of the fuel. The chain reaction is stopped when one or more of the 3 fire triangle elements disappears or is blocked.
So my question for you today is this: what are the elements that keep your creative pilot light burning? I think we do ourselves a disservice mistaking the chemical reaction (or creative output) for our creative impulse itself. When we see the flames of artistic passion resulting in our work, what we are actually witnessing is a chain of events, a combination of certain elements that must exist in certain quantities and only when they do, when they are all present, does the flame ignite. We deprive our creative fires from oxygen and wonder why our flame isn’t roaring.
Your creative work is not your worth, stopping to rest and recalibrate does not put your lovability or potential in jeopardy. Fan the flame, my friends. If we all set better boundaries and think deeply about our expectations of ourselves and others, if we rested before we got injured or burnt out, if we practiced good creative passion fire safety, think of all the warmth we could offer the world? Your creative impulse will burn out without fuel, which could mean friendship, a pursuit of your inner artist, fun, joy, play. It will burn out without oxygen, a self-care that is deeper than bubble baths but likely involves doing hard things like therapy and facing your fears, and something to burn–prioritizing your time because making things matters. When you are creating from a place of scarcity, the fire dies.
So let this be a reminder that we each have our own flame to tend, because when we do, the most incredible things happen… a creative chemical reaction that is more beautiful and mysterious than anything we could ever imagine. As the author cormac mccarthy said, “Keep a little fire burning. However small. However hidden.”
That’s it for this week’s episode of artists for joy
Today’s music features Andrys Basten performing a piano piece by Amy Beach, Roxana Pavel Goldstein playing romances of Dvorak, and yours truly playing works I transcribed by Franz Shubert, oh and the Leeds chamber orchestra playing some handel’s music for the royal fireworks because I just couldn’t help myself. Our theme song is by angela sheik.
Our latest registration for the artist’s way creative cluster went live. Click the link in the show notes to register today and learn more.
And if you want to make my day you can go to apple podcasts and leave me a review over there, it would mean the world. Someone wrote one recently called “exactly what my writer heart needs” it said: This podcast speaks to my head and opens my heart. I feel lighter after listening, and I’m reminded that I’m a part of this big, amazing artist community. Thank you, Meredith, for putting this lovely work into the universe!”
You are so welcome and thank you for listening. We are up to about 80 reviews and my dream would be able to get to 100 before the end of the year. Can you help me get there? Click the link in the show notes, click 5 stars and share what you love. All of you who share the show with friends and fellow artists, I am so eternally grateful. Thank you from the bottom of my almost 40 heart.
I’ll be back next week with a creative coaching episode with some prompts and questions to help you get clear about your expectations, boundaries and rest. Plus I’ll put some of the music from this week’s show, center stage. Until then, take good care.
Today’s sounds of joy is a little recording I made a couple of weeks back on the way to the grocery store. My husband has this thing he does where he gets an idea for a song and insists that we stop everything and record it immediately so he won’t forget (he has yet to do anything with all these little jingle recordings mind you) but now being married to him for 6 years or so, these things rub off on a girl, so here is my new hit single, here we go to trader joes. Enjoy.