Chief Change Officer
#121 Chief Burnout Officer Michael Levitt: How Surviving a Heart Attack Changed His Approach to Life and Tech
Wed, 25 Dec 2024
Imagine losing your job, your car, your home—and on top of it all, surviving a heart attack. That was Michael Levitt’s reality more than ten years ago, caused by the silent epidemic of burnout. Now, as the Chief Burnout Officer and Founder of Breakfast Leadership Network, Michael has transformed his life’s biggest challenges into a mission to help others. With a career spanning accounting, finance, IT, healthcare, and more, he’s authored Burnout Proof and hosts a Top 200 podcast, sharing strategies for navigating stress in work and life. Key Highlights of Our Interview: Turning Pain into Purpose “Burnout gave me the business idea I never wanted but absolutely needed. Now, I help others dodge the burnout bullet. It’s fulfilling work, though I wouldn’t mind a world where burnout is just a myth.” Reboot, Don’t Overhaul “Burnout recovery doesn’t require burning your whole life down. Most people don’t need a dramatic reinvention—they just need a couple of tweaks. Think of it as upgrading your OS, not switching to a whole new system.” Secrets of the C-Suite “Burnout among executives is a taboo topic. Publicly traded CEOs can’t just say, ‘I’m burnt out,’ without sending their stock into a tailspin. My job? Help them recover in secret, like the James Bond of workplace wellness.” Sleep: The Real Magic Pill “Forget apps and quick fixes—good sleep is the ultimate burnout buster. Invest in a killer mattress, toss your phone out of the bedroom, and let your body do its thing. Pro tip: A real alarm clock beats your buzzing smartphone every time.” Food Matters (And Yes, That Includes the Red Page) “Turns out, your body might hate your favorite foods. A food intolerance test revealed my love for certain snacks wasn’t mutual. Now, I dodge the red-listed foods like a ninja and feel way better for it.” _________________________ Connect with Us: Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Michael Levitt ______________________ --Chief Change Officer-- Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself. Open a World of Deep Human Intelligence for Growth Progressives, Visionary Underdogs, Transformation Gurus & Bold Hearts. 6 Million+ All-Time Downloads. Reaching 80+ Countries Daily. Global Top 3% Podcast. Top 10 US Business. Top 1 US Careers. >>>100,000+ subscribers are outgrowing. Act Today.<<< --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: What is burnout and why does it affect so many?
We're all facing different challenges in today's world, but regardless of your age, generation, gender, cultural, and family background, there's one enemy that unites us, burnout. Believe me, I've been there once, twice, and more than twice. Today, we're joined by a fellow burnout survivor and a self-proclaimed chief burnout officer, Michael Levick, from the Breakfast Leadership Network.
Michael turned his personal experience into a powerful force for change, helping individuals and organizations overcome burnout and rebound stronger. We had a great conversation on his show, and now he's here to share his insights and strategies with you. get ready for a conversation between your chief change officer and chief burnout officer.
Let's dive deep into Michael's journey and learn how to fight burnout for good. Welcome, Michael. Thank you for coming to my podcast.
Thank you, Vince. 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.
Chapter 2: How did Michael Levitt become the Chief Burnout Officer?
Thank you so much. My show is called Chief Change Officer because this podcast is my 18th career transition in the past 36 years. I always believe that change opens up opportunities, drives personal growth, and innovates society for good. So far, I've invited quite a number of C-level leaders to my podcast, but you are the first ever Chief Burnout Officer. Can you explain to me why this title?
How did you come up with this title?
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.
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,
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. So that's where the title came from.
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.
You just mentioned in your life, in your career, you've experienced burnout badly. Share with us about your experience back then and how this pain got transformed into a positive force for change and eventually turned into a business today.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: What personal experiences shaped Michael's approach to burnout?
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.
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. 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.
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 years.
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
Let me tell you a quick story, something that happened just a few days ago. I was scrolling through social media, not something I do often, just killing some time. I stumbled across a post from someone I don't know. This person identified himself or herself as Gen Z. This person had written something really simple, yet profound, which is, this world is so burned out. I feel burned out.
So I replied, equally simply, I think many of us feel burned out, especially in today's economy. And I added, by the way, I'm from Gen X. To my surprise, that comment got a lot of likes. What this made me realize is that it doesn't really matter if you're from Gen X, Y, Z, or if you're a baby boomer.
It doesn't matter if you're American, Chinese, Japanese, European, whatever your nationality, whatever your cultural background, whatever your political views, whatever your gender, if there's one common enemy we all face today, I call it burnout. Would you agree?
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 keep track of where I speak. And I always have the industry.
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Chapter 4: What are effective strategies for preventing burnout?
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.
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
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.
Office politics.
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 in politics. 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.
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.
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.
So let's say you weighed 300 pounds and you lost a ton of weight because you changed your diet, you exercised, maybe you 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.
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.
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Chapter 5: How does stigma around burnout affect executives?
Chapter 6: What role does sleep play in combating burnout?
Chapter 7: How can food choices impact mental health and burnout?
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. 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
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
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, all that. I publicly declare it, but that's my choice.
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.
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. And 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 that 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. Once they address the stigma of burnout,
and address it get their trust then we can start doing the work and and the work is simple for me anyway it's one of the reasons why you know i got certified in cognitive behavioral therapy and neurolinguistic programming much easier to say cbt and nlp therapy by the way because those are some mouthful words
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.
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