Michael Levitt
Appearances
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Yeah, you hit it right on the head when it comes to C-suite executives and C-suite leaders having a difficult time because of the stigma of burnout. There's a mental health component to it. Actually, a lot of people do in talks and things like that. They'll ask burnout, especially with the science and all that. It sounds a lot like depression. There are a ton of similarities between the two.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
As someone who has dealt with both, I've dealt with clinical depression myself, as well as burnout. I'll tell you, yeah, there are a lot of similarities, but the key difference is with burnout, you can still muster up the energy to go out and do it. You're fatigued, you're cloudy, you're wiped out, but you're still out there just grinding and just doing it.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
You're tired, you want to go to sleep, your body aches, everything, but you're still doing it. When you're clinically depressed, even doing that is a big ask, and sometimes you can't. There are just days where you just like, I can't get out of bed, or I just want to go take a nap. And there's nothing intrinsically wrong with taking a nap. I'm a big fan of them.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
But when you don't want to do anything, even things you enjoy doing, that's a big warning sign. But to get back to your original question, because of the stigma of it, and also it's a delicate balance.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
It is one of the reasons why I don't list all the companies that I've worked with on my website because usually consulting or organizations, we've worked with these companies and they list a bunch of them and all of that. And there's some companies that I've dealt with in the past that are publicly traded. Their C-suite is the team that I worked with.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Could have been an individual, could have been with a couple of them. The problem is because of the stigma, if it got out that the CEO of
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
this publicly traded company is dealing with depression or burnout what's going to happen to their stock in all likelihood at least in the short term it's probably going to go down it may go down a lot which means shareholders and the business could lose millions billions trillions who knows so this goes back to my healthcare training where privacy is critically important so i don't tell even my spouse
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
who I'm working with. I just don't. I might say a company if I can, or I'll say I'm working with this industry. I don't say who I work with because I strongly believe in privacy. Even though I'm quite public, I just said a few minutes ago, yeah, I've been clinically depressed and I've burned out and all that stuff. I lost my job, lost this and all that. I publicly declared, but that's my choice.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
I can do that. And my company's not publicly traded. If somebody wants to take it public, okay, they can talk with me. We'll have that conversation. But I I think ultimately getting past that stigma for executives is the first thing. And in understanding that and acknowledging that, because if they're worried about this getting out, it's not going to get out for me.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
And secondly, it's literally earning their trust. They got to trust me. Our purpose is to get them past burnout, to get them back to their best version of themselves. And one of the biggest reasons why I hate burnout so much is it robs society of great products and services.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
a lot of people say what do you mean by that if people are burned out they're not their best which means they're not making their best stuff they're not doing the best work they're not creating so there's products and services that might exist today that would make our lives easier that unfortunately won't exist because the creators or the people who are thinking about it are burned out and they don't have the energy to carry it forward so we lose as a society when people are burned out
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Once they address the stigma of burnout and address it, get their trust, then we can start doing the work. And the work is simple for me anyway. It's one of the reasons why I got certified in cognitive behavioral therapy and neuro-linguistic programming. Much easier to say CBT and NLP therapy, by the way, because those are some mouthful words.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
But the reason why I did that was time and time again, I kept running into people having similar issues. And a lot of it was what they were telling themselves, their beliefs, their habits, their thought patterns, their programming that they have instilled in their lives. And it's much like programs on your phone or apps on your phone or on your computer.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
you can uninstall them and you can install better apps and better programs for you to live your life the way you want your life to be and just giving them that initial courage that they can make the adjustments that they need to make in my situation real quick i had to reinvent my life because the way that i was living painfully wasn't the best way to live
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Thank you. It's always good to speak with you. I'm thrilled that you launched your own show too. I always encourage people if they even want to test it out, go for it because your voice and your opinions and your insights are unique to you and the world needs as many insights on things as possible. So congratulations on the launch of your show.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
But for 99% of the other people out there that are burned out or approaching burnout, you don't need to reinvite your life. Just make a couple adjustments here and there. You'll see humongous dividends when you do so.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Yeah, the first one, turning around an organization culture, they had a ton of turnover. In their early days, they were a startup organization, ton of turnover, no trust, no communication. People were stressed, people were leaving, and these were young people by any stretch. They were well-educated individuals that were leaving like they were quitting a fast food job as a teenager.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
And I'm like, okay, what's going on here? And it boiled down to communication and trust was a big issue. Expectations, I think, were another. Miscommunication, going back to the communication thing, seems to be a common challenge. And then toss in some ego, and you have yourself a toxic environment. So for me, it was like, okay, let's get to the bottom of this. So
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
The nice thing about it was how I approached it was, look, I'm your friend here. I want to make this better for you. If you were in my seat, what would you change? What would you do? And once they trusted me and felt comfortable sharing, then they were an open book, and they would share all the things.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
And I put them all together, and there was a lot of commonality on both sides, both parties, the one – the upper management and the staff. And once we got to those commonalities, I met with them individually. And then I met with them in small groups and we just shared the misconceptions that people had and misunderstandings.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
It went from an organization that was having just tremendous turnover every year to a year later, they were averaging around 6% turnover and they were well in the double digits before. And all it was for me, I say all it was, I tend to simplify things, but I know the work was pretty instrumental.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
It was a situation where it just turned things around and it became an organization instead of being or having a reputation of being a toxic workplace to an organization where people were applying to work there when there were no roles open. They wanted to be a part of it because they knew and heard that this was a great place to work. And it was the same people.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
It wasn't a case of where we just fired everybody and turned everything around. No, it was the same people that were there before. And the majority of them are still there.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
It speaks volumes to if they are, and this is a common thing, if the organization and the upper management and the employees as well are willing to be open about some opportunities and suggestions on how to make things better, if they're open to it, to give it a try, then they have a fighting chance.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
If they're close-minded and they just keep blaming everybody else, there's no common ground to be found, unfortunately, and those organizations will continue to struggle. That was definitely a win. An organization where it wasn't as challenging was the opposite effect. They were an organization that was doing well, but then decided because there was some
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
In fighting in the upper ranks of the organization and certain organizational members, I got to frame this very carefully, that were power hungry is a good way to describe it.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
There you go. Yeah, definitely. And there was some power brokers that wanted more power and felt that their way was the best way to go. And not typically a wrong idea to think that. But their approach was a bit abrasive, lacked merit, lacked proper research, lacked all kinds of different things. And then they ended up letting go some key people that was making that organization thrive.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
And then that organization went from being really successful, always in profit, to an organization that lost revenue, lost key people, and is not doing well. For me, it was a situation, and I think the biggest lesson learned is... And this goes back to a talk that I attended years ago that isn't related, but there's some similarity to it. It was a health symposium.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
So it was a day-long health conference talking about different programs and initiatives you could implement in your healthcare organization. And there was a physician that was giving a talk and his talk was about weight loss. And one of the things that I learned from that, and I didn't know this before, is that Our body's natural inclination is for it to get to the weight of our highest weight.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
So let's say you weighed 300 pounds and you lost a ton of weight because you changed your diet, you exercised, maybe had a medical procedure to lose the weight, whatever the situation is. Your body, for some reason, the brain, body combination, all that stuff says, no, you were 300 pounds at one point. We have to get back to that.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
That's why people struggle so much with losing weight and keeping it off is because your body is fighting you on it. They're like, no, we want to go back to that. and it's the same thing with some organizations are just inherently toxic and you can correct them and make them healthy but that gravitational pull to return back to the way things were is very strong so if you don't
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
manage it, if you don't nurture it, you don't keep on top of it, you can have a stellar organization return to its toxic traits in a very short period of time. So it's not a set it and forget it kind of thing. And that was the lesson that I learned was, okay, I, and many consultants do. You go in, you give them the ideas. It's clear as day to yourself. They say it's clear to them.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
They implement it, which is always nice when they do that. And they see the big changes. And then all of a sudden, a few years later, they're right back into the problem they did before. And I've seen that even with keynote talks. I've given keynote talks to organizations and was brought back several years later when they had new people there, new management.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
And they're like, we're having the same problem again. Oh, okay. I'll take your money again. I'm saddened by this because for me, and I have to be careful about this. Sometimes you get to be self-judgmental and they go, maybe my talk isn't good. Maybe I'm not convincing people. Maybe they, and that's not it. It's the old saying, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
It's the same thing. You can say, here are all of the solutions that will make you feel better. But it is up to them to implement them. And you cannot do that as a consultant. You can't do that as a coach. You can't do that as a manager. You can't get people to do something they are refusing to do. You can encourage them. You can show them all the benefits of it.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
But unless they want to do it, they're not going to do it. And that includes stopping their burnout. Some people, unfortunately, love playing the victim. And I hate to be that person. blunt about it, but they do like I'm burned out or I'm a single parent or I've lost my job. Nobody wants to hire me. And it's okay. What are you going to do about it? I'm Gen X too.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
We tend to be pretty straightforward on it. Maybe not as blunt as our predecessors, the boomers. They tend to be pretty blunt. You can take that for what it's worth. I appreciate it. I love a straight shooter. No. Yeah. Does it sting sometimes and how they present things? Of course. But Once your ego dusts itself off, everything's good again.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
But again, all you can do is bring the information, share the insights of what we've learned, the research, how it's backed, and the benefits of adjusting a few things here and there. And it goes a long way in making things better for you. Those are the couple stories of many that I've encountered over my career and in recent years and in the works that I do.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Usually what I'll do, and this is again leveraging a lot of therapy work, is have you talk about your current career or the one you're leaving. One of the things we'll talk about is having you go back in time when you first applied for that role and what your feelings were when you were selected and hired and that first day. Go back in that and think about that.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
First, it came to me in the shower, as a lot of good ideas do. That's why it's always good to invest in those markers you can write on a wall in the shower, because a lot of times you're just thinking about different things while you're getting cleaned up. And that title came out to me because... I've been dealing with the burnout space since my own personal journey with burnout back in 2009.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Typically, in most cases, those are some happy memories. Those are some happy thoughts. And then we flush out, okay, what changed? From your perspective, what changed? What was going on? And through that conversation can flush out some of the causes
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
could be external maybe there was a new manager and that manager was not easy to work with or wasn't clearly communicating or who knows there could be all kinds of different things or could be internal you might have been going through something else during that time maybe
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
uh relationship challenges a loss of a loved one or a pet which is a loved one too so i i don't need to separate those but both are traumatic for people and there's all kinds of other things that could be going on it might be the economy it might be upset your team hasn't won in a while or they traded away your favorite player is i don't want to say simple or silly because it's not some people are very passionate about a lot of things in life
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
It's just getting to the bottom of, okay, where are some of the ingredients that are adding to this? It's okay. Then from there we can see, are there opportunities to maybe look at things differently or change your perspective on a particular matter to identify that jerk manager that left from the organization because people leave their managers. They don't necessarily leave their companies.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
They leave their managers. Putting yourself kind of in their shoes. What do you think their motivation is? It'll go from, oh, they're just evil and mean. It's like, do you think they may have some self-confidence issues? Do you think they don't feel prepared as a manager? So they are defaulting to being this...
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
quote-unquote bossy person to do these things to try to cover up for their own self inadequacies if you thought about that what is if you if you dig back deep enough or peel back enough layers you can actually see that in people now it takes time it takes practice it also helps you study mental health and you get a better understanding of why people do what they do
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
which is great, but then also frustrating because then all of a sudden you start, and this is just me personally speaking, you get frustrated because you're like, I know what their motivation was in that, or I know why they're doing this. And you want to tell them that, but it could, it would come off completely wrong sometimes if you do. So it's
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
It's like knowing the end of the story of a movie and you're watching it with your good friend who hasn't seen the movie yet. And you want to say, oh, yeah, this person does. And you just have to keep your mouth shut. It's that kind of frustration sometimes. But it's one of those things where you got to meet people where they are. and work with them from there.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
A lot of new therapists and consultants, they'll say, okay, page one of the consulting book. And no, you don't do that. You got to figure out where people are and then you go to that particular page. Get that low-lying crew, get them some confidence for themselves, and then you'll see how much more they want to work.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Because otherwise, if you start at page one, they might be at page 30, and you're going to lose them before you get to page 30 because they're going to be bored. So you got to meet people where they are when it comes to burnout, and then start from there.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
But basically 2014 is when it started to bounce around in my head anyways. And the title of Chief Burnout Officer, as far as they know, I'm the only person that has it. I don't have a trademark. So just basically, if any organization wants to use it,
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Yep, I'll give you the signs that I see time and time again. One, you're fatigued. You're not sleeping well. Your body aches in places you didn't know you had, and you're just not feeling well. That's a big warning sign. Another one, which was a huge red flag for me, is... You lose interest in doing things in life. And I'm not talking about work. I'm talking about in your personal life.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
You quit doing things with your friends that you normally love doing. You quit all your hobbies. You just don't want to do any of that anymore. You find that communication with people colleagues and loved ones is harder. Maybe you're a little bit more irritated than normal. And we see that a lot.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
There's a lot of people that are angry right now because I think a lot of people are dealing with certain levels of burnout and stress and fatigue over finances, wars, you name it. The post pandemic, all of these things have been taking a toll on people.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
And if you notice, too, that the intake of food and you're not taking time to eat or your food choices aren't what they used to be and you're starting to feel the aftermath of eating too many processed foods and not eating real food. And that will take a toll on you as well. So those are some of the signs to warn out or look out for if you think you're burning out. Now, how to fix it?
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
There's several ways to do it. Make sure you schedule time to be active, eat the right foods for you. And that means figuring out what foods are right for you. I had a food intolerance test done a few years ago. They tested me on over 250 types of foods, and I got a beautiful report, color-coded. that indicated, okay, these are the foods that are good for you.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
by all means, because if you're going to use that title, what that means is you are focused full center on preventing burnout in your organization and yourself, as well as if someone is burned out, to give them the space and the tools that they need to recover from it, and then eventually prevent it from ever happening again to them. That's where the title came from.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Your body naturally likes these foods. And then the page that was in red, which had a lot of items on it, unfortunately, are the foods that I should probably stay away from because I have an intolerance to them in varying degrees, but it was still the red page. I do my best to avoid any of the foods that are on that page. And what happens is my digestive system works better.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
The food that I eat is naturally good for me and my body breaks it down naturally without any issues. So I don't have to have Tums or acid reflux or anything like that. But if there was one magic pill bullet thing that I would tell people to focus on if they want to help prevent burnout or at least reduce the impact of it is really focus on your sleep. Get really good sleep.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
spend as much money as you can on the best mattress you can afford the best bedding the best pillow sheets blankets all of that stuff go buy an alarm clock don't use your smartphone as an alarm clock get that device out of your bedroom and set your
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
up for the best possible sleep you get every night because when you get a good night's sleep, your body repairs the damage that we do to ourselves on a daily basis, which means you wake up more refreshed, which means you can face those stressful situations in life a little bit better. And prolonged stress is what turns into burnout. So if you don't have prolonged stress, you won't burn out.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Thank you, Vince.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
It's something that I strongly believe in because I don't like burnout at all. And I hate what it robs from all of us when people and teams and organizations are burned out.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Of course, back in 2007, I was hired as a healthcare executive. I was working some absolute insane hours and building up this brand new clinic in a community that was under service that we just didn't have enough doctors in the community to meet the demand of the patients and people in that town. So.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
I was working some long hours, recruiting physicians, hiring staff, understanding the health care system because I had never worked in health care before. I had a lot of startup experience, but I'd never worked in health care before. So it was a steep learning curve for me, but it was one that I took on.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
I look back at it was a mistake is this is one of those things that happens to people when they burn out is it looks like a good idea to take everything on your shoulders and say, look, I'm going to treat this as if it's my own company and I'm going to build it. It wasn't my own company, but I acted like it was.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
So as entrepreneurs know, and as when the multiple careers that you've had in your life, there are times where you just pick up the load and you go, you know, like, okay, we're just going to get this done. But I did that for a solid two plus years. And it caught up with me in the spring of 2009, where over a period of 369 days, so just over a year from May 2009 to May 2010, This happened to me.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
I had a heart attack that should have killed me. 17 weeks later, I was laid off during the Great Recession. A few months later, because I was on heart medication that cost me $1,000 a month out of pocket, had to feed my family and all of that while still looking for a job and not having a lot of income coming in.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
The bank decided to repossess our family vehicle because we didn't have enough money to pay our bills. And then after that happened, we moved to Toronto because they found a work opportunity in Toronto. And then a couple of weeks into it, or actually it was six weeks, after six weeks of working up here, moved the family up here, was getting ready to sell our house back where we had left.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
And I went back there the following weekend after I moved to grab whatever else we forgot. And there was a note on the door and a huge padlock that said foreclosed. So in a year, I had a heart attack, job loss, car repossession, home foreclosure, all in a year. And all those things happened to me because I was burned out. I wasn't taking care of myself. I wasn't resting.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
I was making mistakes at work. I was irritable. The poster child for burnout, I would have been on it because I was checking all the boxes for it. Now, after having all of those experiences, some would say, you survived. And I could have chose the path saying, you know what? I'm Superman. I survived it. Here I am. I'm just going to continue on.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
But I recognized right away that, especially at the age I was at that time, that's way too young to have a heart attack. I thought, I need to make some changes. And as I started to, and I started to unpack all that had happened,
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
and it wasn't just for the last two years i did a deep dive and i went back as far back as i could remember to say okay why did i make the choices that i made what was my goals what was my motivation for that and i didn't do it in a critical fashion i think a lot of people do that when they're looking within your we're often quite critical of ourselves
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
But I thankfully had the mindset of saying, no, I'm going to look at this like a curiosity of a four-year-old and just say, what's this? Why this? How does that work? So that's how I did it. I approached it as just an outsider looking and going, why was that important to me to do it that way? Why did I do that? What was I trying to accomplish?
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Was there something else that caused me to do that or make that decision? and that took time my only regret not that i have regrets in life but i do have a regret that i didn't work with a therapist before that i have a therapist now and i highly suggest and recommend everyone should have a therapist everyone there's something in your life either now or in the past or potentially in the future
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
that you're going to need to work through and if you have somebody that is a therapist they can help you through that it's not laying down on the couch and saying what's wrong in your world necessarily but it's really helpful so i wish i would have worked with a therapist back then because it would have sped along some things i still was able to do that so after recovering
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
And after getting back on my feet and finding a new job, just going about things differently, I started noticing and I realized what was going on and that I was burned out. So I started researching burnout and was alarmed. And this was again in 2014, alarmed on the number of cases that I was seeing in burnout in a variety of different sectors, not just healthcare. That was 10 years ago.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Fast forward to today, burnout is worse than it was 10 years ago. And it's impacting our industry. I thought, you know what, I need to start sharing What I'm discovering about burnouts, I started writing about it on a blog and started talking with people about it, started doing little talks at different conferences and things about it.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
And then a colleague of mine said, you know what, you probably have a consulting business here. That's what I did. I said, okay, let's launch this. And then that led to another colleague saying, launch podcasts and share tidbits on how to prevent burnout. And that's how the original format of my show was for the first year or so.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
And then I started interviewing guests and meeting great human beings like yourself and a bunch of people across the planet, which has been great. So it spun off into a consulting, content creation, keynote speaking type of entity that I've been working on for
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
now seven years or actually closer to eight and it's been both very enjoyable but also very sad because nothing would make me happier than for burnout to go away and I don't need to you know talk about it or work with people on it or anything like that I'm thankful that I have the opportunity to but I wish I didn't have to because they wouldn't you know because they're not burned out
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
Oh, I definitely agree. It doesn't matter what, as you said, what demographic you're from, your gender, where you're from, what type of work you do, the career, anything like that. It doesn't matter. It attacks you. And it's one of those things that time and time again, I see it. And over the last few years on my keynote talks, I've and keep track of where I speak, and I always have the industry.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
I've spoke legal, education, farming, insurance, finance, retail, manufacturing, nonprofit, for-profit, every industry, you name it. So, yep, I've done something for them, whether it's been a Fortune 500 company or... an independent insurance organization outside of Boston or a talk for European leaders. It doesn't matter. Burnout hits everybody.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
And it's one of those things that even the World Health Organization recognized burnout as a workplace phenomenon back in 2018 or 2019, prior to all their work with the pandemic. And for them to recognize burnout is a huge issue globally brought to light, okay, this is not something that's just a thing that's in style right now. This is legitimately a problem for people and
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
We need to get to the bottom of it, figure out what it is, identify the signs, which we can easily do. But the thing with burnout recovery or even burnout prevention is the steps that I see work that I used on myself and I've seen others work through them and it's helped me.
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
are really easy to do but unfortunately they're also easy not to do and we as humans tend to lean more towards the comfort way of living instead of doing a little bit of challenging work on ourselves and that's that's one of the things that is so hard is when we need to work on us
Chief Change Officer
#209 Michael Levitt’s Wake-Up Call: Burned Out, Broke, and Back Again
For some reason, that's really difficult for some people to do, which is strange in a way, if you think about it, because we're never around anybody else longer than we are with ourselves. So it's an interesting dynamic to see people struggle with trying to do things to make themselves feel better, look better, and be better.