Avoid High Achiever Burnout in Your Coaching Business by Using This Daily 5-Minute Practice

Are you constantly chasing the next goal, striving for success, but finding it harder to stay present in the moment? As high-achieving coaches, that drive can take a toll on your energy, relationships, and overall well-being—leading straight to burnout. In this episode of Coach Smarter, Stephen Box shares a simple, science-backed practice that takes just five minutes a day but can dramatically shift your mindset and protect your energy.

By the end of this episode, you’ll discover:

• Why your relentless drive for "what’s next" might be holding you back.
• The mental reset that high-achievers need but rarely prioritize.
• A daily practice that fosters focus, gratitude, and emotional resilience.
• How this small habit can strengthen relationships and help you avoid burnout.

Ready to find balance without losing your edge? Tune in to learn how this practice can transform your approach to success while aligning your business and life.

Download Your Free Gratitude Journal Here (No Email Required)

Transcript

Stephen Box: 0:00

As a high achiever, you're always chasing the next big goal, pushing your boundaries and striving to grow. That drive is what makes you successful. It does come with a catch. When you relentlessly pursue what's next, it can keep you from being present in what is right now. And that robs you of time with the people and the things that are important in your life. And that is a fast track to burnout. So on today's episode, I'm going to give you a five minute practice that will help you to stay present and protect your time and energy so you can avoid that burnout. And that's coming up next, right here on Coach Smarter. Welcome to Coach Smarter, the show for online coaches who understand that true success doesn't come from doing more. It comes from doing what matters most and aligning your business with your life. I'm your host, Stephen Voss. We'll And I want to show you how to grow a profitable, sustainable coaching business without sacrificing your health, relationships, or personal time. So if you're ready to grow your online coaching business without getting burned out, let me show you how to coach smarter, not harder. Welcome to another episode of Coach Smarter brought to you by Unshakable Habits. I am your host, Stephen Box. As I sit here a couple days before Thanksgiving, I can't help but to think how blessed and fortunate I am to get to do the things I do today. That was not always the case. There was a time back when I worked in retail management that I definitely was in the high achiever category. And I was never satisfied with anything. Nothing was ever good enough. I always wanted more. I was always chasing after perfection. I wanted to be the best. I wanted to fail. create the perfect sales pitch. I wanted to create the perfect way to get people to buy more stuff. And this was something that really consumed me. And if I had a good day at work, in terms of sales and productivity and getting things done, I felt really accomplished. And if I didn't have a good day, if I had a bad day, It really took a toll on me, and there was a lot of ups and downs in there that I honestly wasn't aware of completely in the moment because I couldn't be in the moment, If I had a bad day, I would literally spend my entire night analyzing what went wrong and why it went wrong and how do I go about fixing it. So, I really found myself eventually burnt out. And I didn't realize that I burned myself out, right? It wasn't until really a little bit later that I had the full realization that I did it to myself by trying to be this super duper high achiever and not finding a way to balance that out a little bit. You see, the goal isn't to not be a high achiever. There's nothing wrong with being a high achiever. That motivation that we have inside of us. That drive, that's what makes us successful, but if we don't balance it out, if we don't have something to kind of bring us back a little bit and keep us present, we will find ourselves in a situation where we just never appreciate anything we have. We're not truly grateful. We're never living in the moment because we're always living in the future. That's just gonna lead to disappointment and burnout I definitely don't want you to have to go through it if you haven't and that's why I wanted to share this five minute practice with you today. And what we're actually talking about is a gratitude journal. Now, I know, some of you just rolled your eyes at me, some of you just said, oh yeah, more of this, gratitude, okay, but hear me out for a second, before you dismiss the idea. Let me give you a list of things that science has shown that starting your day with gratitude can actually do. Number one, it can shift your perspective from deficit to abundance. Right, so you go from Thinking about what's not done or what you want to do or what you want to accomplish because there's this feeling that there's not enough there, right? I need more. I need the next thing, right? It's a deficit mindset. An abundance mindset, on the other hand, says I already have good things in my life. And it doesn't mean that I don't want more good things and it doesn't mean that I'm not going to still be driven, that I'm not going to still go after things. It just means I'm going to be a little bit more selective about what I go after and what I'm driven towards, right? Number two, it can reduce stress and overwhelm. A lot of us who are high achievers don't necessarily think that we're stressed because we're so used to putting ourselves into stressful and challenging situations that we tell ourselves how well we handle it. And we do, to be fair, handle it maybe better than a lot of people do. But the reality is, we still get stressed, we still get overwhelmed. When you focus on gratitude, it has been shown to lower your cortisol levels, which reduces your stress. So just a daily gratitude practice. can act as a mental reset for you and imagine how much better you're going to be able to show up on a coaching call with a client when you have a calm mindset versus going to that call with a free tick mindset. Imagine how much more engaged you're going to be with your family after work when you're not bringing work to that conversation or to that situation. Number three is building emotional resilience. When you are thankful for what you have, it grounds you. It gives you something to always bounce back to when you have setbacks. And if you haven't had a setback yet as a coach or a business owner, just wait. You will. It's a guarantee. Number four, it actually does strengthen those relationships. You know, I talked a little bit about that earlier. About how you're going to be able to show up better for your clients and for your family and for your friends. And what do you think happens when you do that? Do you think they're going to respond positively to you? Of course they are, right? The fifth thing is it makes you more focused and productive. I know this one seems a little weird because when you are a high achiever, you feel like you are already locked in, right? You are already focused and productive. And I'm not disagreeing with that. But what I will say is this. It's like if I go to the gym and I get on the bench press and I say I do a weight that I can lift six times. If I just try to lift that same weight for six more reps after like 30 seconds, I'm not gonna be able to do it. I haven't allowed the muscles proper time to recover. But if I wait like two, three minutes and I do it again, I'm I'm going to be able to do another six reps because I allowed my body the time to recover. Gratitude is, again, like that mental reset. So when we get that mental reset, and we get all the negativity out, we get all the stress out, and we get to focus on something positive, it's going to make us actually more focused and more productive. And if you don't believe it, I would just challenge you to try it. Number six, if you are practicing this very simple thing, you're going to have a better work life harmony. It's just the way that it is. Because gratitude not only helps you realize what you have, It helps you realize what you want more of, and I'm going to tell you a lot of us, when it comes down to it, what we realize is it's not more sales. It's not more clients. It's not more money. It's more time. It's more relationships. It's more connection. That's what a lot of us really want. Speaking of that reflection of what you already have and what you want, it also can increase your own intrinsic motivation because now you're not just going after some external thing. You're going after what's actually in alignment with your values, with your priorities, and with your identities, okay? So that's seven things right there that a simple gratitude practice have been proven to be able to help you do. And I want to keep this very, very simple for you. And I'm actually gonna down, include a link in the show notes where you can go download this for yourself. that way if you just want to print it out and use it every day. But I'm going to break this down for you very simply. We have a morning intention and an evening reflection. Each one will take you about five minutes to fill in each day. So not a lot of time to do this. For the morning intention, our goal here is just to set a focus for the day. And we do that with two simple questions. First question is, Today I'll show up with excellence and passion. And then underneath that you're going to see three boxes. And the first one says in my work by, so I'm going to show up with excellence and passion in my work by, for my family by, for myself by. So when you have these three things, you now get an absolute focus on how you want to spend your day. And you're doing it with gratitude because this is something you get to show up with excellence and passion for. This isn't something you have to do, not a to do list. This is the stuff you get to show up and do, and you get to be thankful for the opportunity to do it. Tell me that's not gonna get you fired up. And then the second question you ask, answer in the morning is, Today will be a successful day if, so define it. Actually, look at what you want to get accomplished and what's going to make today a successful day for you. If you don't include this question, here's the danger. You'll get to the end of the day and you'll start thinking about what you didn't do. You'll start thinking about the next challenge. You'll start thinking about what's next. and you'll never reflect on if you truly were successful today. So write down what will make today successful so that at the end of the day you have something to review against. All right, so speaking of the end of the day, that's it for the morning. So in the evening, you can do this right after work. You can do this before bed, but you're going to answer three additional questions. Number one, you're going to write down three things that you are grateful for today. Then you're going to write down your wins and moments that you're proud of. So wins are pretty obvious, right? But I will say it doesn't have to be big wins. Even small wins matter. So celebrate even the small wins. In moments that you're proud of, one thing I love to do here is if there's a particular challenge that I had come up during the course of the day and I got an opportunity to overcome that challenge and I was successful in doing so, I'll put that down because that's something I'm really proud of. is because it was the behavior that I got to choose how I wanted to handle something. And then also write down, good things that happened today. So this is kind of just an opportunity for you to fill in anything that you feel didn't feel like fit into the other two boxes. You can just add those there, and this will just create an overall appreciation for you. So, I would just challenge, even if you think the whole thing with gratitude is a little bit nonsense, and you don't really know if it's going to help, I'm just going to challenge you guys, go on to the show notes, download the PDF, and try this out for a minimum of two weeks. Just give it two weeks and see what happens. It will take you five minutes in the morning, five minutes in the evening. You can just print off a bunch of sheets of it. I even have a sample sheet where I put some answers in to give you an idea of the way I might answer them. Just give this two weeks. I guarantee you it will make a huge difference for you. As we wrap up today's episode, I do want to invite you to join us next week where I will be talking about the 10-80-10 principle and how it can help you to develop unshakable habits and develop new skills. If you enjoyed today's episode, I would really appreciate if you could give us a review on Apple Podcasts, or if you are on Spotify, give us a rating and a comment on this episode. And also, if you would like to get more content from me, on a regular basis, make sure you follow me on Instagram@UnshakableHabits until next time, this is Stephen Box reminding you that true success isn't about doing more. It's about doing the right things and aligning your business and your life so you can break free from the chaos and start living life on your terms.