RMG Agent Podcast
Welcome to the RMG Agent Podcast - the podcast curated exclusively for real estate agents by real estate agents. I'm your host, Reed Moore: it is my mission to create wealth and wholeness with everyone I serve. That includes you!
Join me as we embark on a journey to expand your real estate career and unlock your potential. Through candid conversations, expert interviews, and proven strategies, we'll explore the art of client relationships, negotiation tactics, lead generation, business development, and so much more.
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RMG Agent Podcast
Episode 72 - Battling Burnout: How Three R's Keep Your Growth Alive
Feeling exhausted on your growth journey? You're not alone. In this revealing episode, Reed and Jake unpack the counterintuitive truth that sustainable personal development requires strategic pauses, not just relentless pushing forward.
We introduce "The Three R's" framework—a powerful diagnostic tool for anyone experiencing growth fatigue. First, we examine how Rest functions as legitimate self-leadership, not laziness. Physical sleep, emotional downtime, and mental disconnection aren't optional luxuries—they're essential practices that prevent burnout from choosing rest for you. As we explain, "If you feel like you have to work seven days a week to get everything done, working five or six days with intentional unplugging will actually help you accomplish more."
Next, we explore Recreation (literally "re-creation") as a necessary component of sustained growth. We distinguish between activities that truly refresh you versus those that merely numb you—a critical difference that determines whether you're rebuilding your resources or simply escaping. What makes you feel alive again? Is it adventure, deep conversation, artistic expression, or something entirely different? The answer is highly individual and worth discovering.
Finally, we discuss Retooling—the intentional sharpening of skills through courses, mentorships, and deliberate practice. "If you're too busy to improve, you're too busy to succeed," as Stephen Covey wisely noted. We share practical approaches to retooling in the real estate world, including the surprisingly generous culture of knowledge-sharing among competitors.
Our challenge to you: Schedule 24 guilt-free hours of rest, do one thing that makes you feel truly alive, and invest in retooling this week. Your sustainable growth depends on it.
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When I'm starting to feel really worn out and fatigued, especially when it comes to growth, I have to stop and take a look and say, okay, what is it that I need right now? If you feel like you have to work seven days a week to get everything done, I promise you, if you're working five or six days a week and being very intentional about unplugging and resting and connection, connecting with family, you will get far more done in more limited hours than you will by just being unrested over a long period of time. Real estate professionals, welcome back to the RMG Agent Podcast, your home for all things growth in your real estate career and life. We're here to impact, empower and encourage you.
Speaker 1:I'm here with Jake Bartlett, as always, and today's episode is gonna be awesome. We are going to be talking about some amazing things, but before we do, I want you to go check out our sponsor, areaprocom forward slash RMG. We absolutely love this product. We use it every day in all of our offices and just think that it's something that every real estate professional needs. So, Jake, where do you want?
Speaker 2:to start Well, I want to encourage you to go check out our last episode, which is Are you Breathing? You Need Encouragement. Yes, which was a take for both of us of kind of our biases, and my bias is that when somebody does encourage me, I tend to like play it off and not really accept it. Oh yeah, what was your bias?
Speaker 1:My bias is to challenge all the time towards personal growth, which sounds so great, except for if you are the recipient of that, without encouragement, it's too much. It's too all the time in your face, and so for both of us it was that aha of like OK, we need to constantly be encouraging each other on this personal growth path, and when people encourage us, we need to stop receive the encouragement, because we can go years sometimes without encouragement. It's not that people around us aren't encouraging us. Is that we're? We're kind of, you know, teflon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly so. But today we're doing the three R's of sustaining growth rest, recreation and retooling.
Speaker 1:Yes, so one of the things I'm passionate about is obviously personal growth.
Speaker 1:We're dedicating an entire season to this, but one of the things that I've found over the years is that any level of sustaining personal growth without really tremendous fatigue, in addition to encouragement, there's these three things that I've just learned as kind of a diagnostic tool.
Speaker 1:So when I'm starting to feel, you know, really worn out and fatigued, especially when it comes to growth, I have to stop and take a look and say, okay, what is it that I need right now? And I learned this the hard way, because many years ago I was just in this place of fatigue and I kept going to more industry conferences and I kept going to more training, and every time I went I would just have this moment of like maybe now I'm refreshed, maybe now I'm, you know, I'm ready to go. And I come home and, man, it didn't even last a day and I was back into the fatigue, back into, you know, being depleted, or or, you know, some people call it burnout. I think those are a little bit two different things. And so I learned that there's three different things that we can do to diagnose what is it in this moment that I need so I can sustain this climb Nice.
Speaker 2:So the first one is rest.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So if you kind of layer in the idea of you know hustle culture and just the constant incessant push of like, do more, and you know all the, and just the constant incessant push of like, do more and you know all the things, and a lot of this comes out of me, right, just the constant challenge, what you can, what you can fail to realize, is that rest is something that's not just this, this thing that you have to do, I guess, occasionally, but resting is a massive part of personal growth and if you think about this, you know, like in your physical health journey, you don't actually make muscle gains or even gains in your endurance. If you're an endurance athlete, by doing the work, you do it by resting really, really well and intentionally after you do the work. So if you watch, you know my kids are doing track right now and it's interesting to watch Matthew, who's an endurance athlete, when he pushes really hard in practice.
Speaker 1:But he doesn't rest well, he doesn't perform well, right, and it's the same for us If we don't rest well, we don't perform well. And so part of this might even just be reframing this idea of rest. And you know, rest is not laziness, it's actually self-leadership. If you think about how hard it is sometimes for somebody who is a top producer or somebody who's pushing really hard even just to convince themselves to rest, convince yourself you need eight hours of sleep instead of four. Convince yourself to actually you know, god forbid take a nap on a Sunday, something like that. It can actually be really, really hard, and so you have to kind of flip your head around this a little bit and realize that rest can be a significant discipline in your personal growth toolbox.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think of the discipline of you know, really high level vocalists and amazing singers. They might not speak for two days before a performance or after a performance. They might not speak for a day before a performance or after a performance. They might not speak for a day because they have to rest their voice, which is their tool. Yes, yeah. And so as we're going through this, as we're pushing hard and we're growing and we're working through this, rest needs to become a big portion of how you get, uh, back to that top performance yeah.
Speaker 1:So when we're talking about rest, there's really three different areas that we need to rest. We need physical rest, right, so so we need to sleep and we need to to to be still right. That might be taking a nap, something like that. We need emotional rest, and emotional rest comes from things like silence, solitude, uh, doing something like a Sabbath habit, a day where you just you just unplug from your commitments, unplug from being constantly connected.
Speaker 1:One of the things I found over the years is that sometimes in my mind, I'll say to myself I don't have time for this or I don't have time for that, I don't have time to get back to that person. The issue is, technically, I have time for it, right, I can make time, but time's not the issue. My emotional bandwidth is, and when I get to a place to where I start becoming less responsive, a lot of times, I can blame it on my calendar, which I have pretty well dialed in, but what it is is I'm not spending enough time in silence or solitude and actually getting the emotional rest that I need.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, the emotional battery is a way I've heard it right Like is you've got to recharge that emotional battery.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and if you ever, if you've ever had a moment, like with your spouse, where they say something and instantly, like you lock up, freeze up or shut down or lash out, right, it can be this issue of I'm actually not emotionally rested enough to be able to deal with this. The third one is is mental rest. We have to actually be able to rest our mind and this is disconnecting from whatever we do for work. Right, I have to fight this a lot. I actually sleep really well most of the time.
Speaker 1:I do an okay job when it comes to my emotional rest, but mental rest sometimes can be hard. So when business is hard or I'm trying to solve really big challenges in my mind, my mind will start just looping, and I used to let it do that, almost like I thought, hey, my brain's a supercomputer and I'm just going to let it run and crack this code. What I started realizing is sometimes when my mind, when I just let it run, it's not actually trying to create new solutions and it's not solving new problems. It's obsessing over the same things over and over and over again, which becomes very fatiguing and it doesn't actually solve anything.
Speaker 2:Yeah, One of the things that we said was when you need mental rest, you become emotionally reactive, which is when I know I need rest. Right, Like I need to mentally rest is that I emotionally react to things in a in a way that I normally would not.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So if we think about, like, just what are some practical ways for you know to, to think about physical rest? So again there's. There's some disciplines here, right? So one of the disciplines that I've learned and the older I get them more this is a big one is that alcohol consumption, especially close to bedtime, is an absolute.
Speaker 1:Like you're playing Russian roulette with your night's sleep, right? So if, if your performance tomorrow is important to you and you want to be rested, you got to pay attention to that. The other things are, you know, is your room cold? Is it dark? Right? Do you have technology right next to you? Are you you know, are you taking in blue light into your eyes right before bed?
Speaker 1:There's just some things like that over time that they sound a little bit obsessive. But if you, if you want to continue on your personal growth path and not constantly have to kind of shut down and stop growing for a while because you're just, you're not rested, you really have to start paying attention to these things. If you feel like you have to work seven days a week to get everything done, I promise you, if you're working five or six days a week and being very intentional about unplugging and resting and connection, connecting with family, you will get far more done in more limited hours than you will by just being unrested over a long period of time limited hours than you will by just being unrested over a long period of time.
Speaker 2:And are we talking with rest? Are we talking just sleep?
Speaker 1:or just taking time away. All of the above. So the physical is a lot of it actually has to do with sleep and the quality of sleep that we have. The emotional and the mental rest have to do more with unplugging, being quiet, being still not being stimulated. So one of the things that's come out, probably over the last four or five years, is how challenging it is to be creative and to be somebody who is able to create new things. If you're not ever bored, you are if you're not ever bored, and my life and our lives and our world is so saturated with the ability to stimulate yourself at any given time that boredom is not an option. Right, growing up I grew up in the country Boredom was like a significant amount of growing up. They're just. You know mom and dad would like in the summer they would. I don't know that your parents did this, but they would kick you out and lock the door.
Speaker 2:Mine would drop me off at a golf course.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, it's just like go, just go and and you start, you start making peace with that. But then you get creative. You go build a fort, you go work on your game, you go do something like that because there's there's space, because space is very, very limited in supply. Unless you create space for it, you can very easily live life without really thinking things through and without ever resting yourself mentally or emotionally. So unplugging and just having silence, solitude, downtime is a pretty powerful discipline to pick up.
Speaker 2:Nice, okay, so rest. Now we got to get to number two, my favorite. Yes, probably your favorite too.
Speaker 1:It is Recreation, yes, recreation. So. So, before we finish on the physical rest, just an awesome quote, just to punch this in is if you don't choose rest, burnout will choose it for you, right? If you are somebody who goes, goes, goes, and then somehow you just get super sick after X number of months of going, that's not something that's inevitable, that's something that most likely is a lack of actual physical rest or space, right? So, ok, so to recreation, which, which is my favorite, again, kind of going back to this, going back to this idea that these disciplines are not laziness, right, they're actually self-leadership.
Speaker 1:It turns out we actually need recreation and if you think about that word recreation, it means re-creation. In other words, I need to go re-create myself, I need to refresh, I need to renew myself and so, again, just like physical sleep, if I'm sleeping really well and I'm doing all of that, but I'm still feeling like man, I'm fatigued in this personal growth thing, like I just need to back off and take some time. The reality is, is that there's a chance that, if we're using this as a diagnostic tool, we can check the box on rest. But now we go and we take a look at recreation and do I treat recreation like it's a necessity for my life? Or do I treat recreation like it's a necessity for my life? Or do I treat recreation like it's a nice thing that I'll get to when I get to some undisclosed location?
Speaker 2:Right, right, yeah. So it's not. This isn't you know, just recreation. On the one week you take off a year.
Speaker 1:Right, right, yeah, no, this is.
Speaker 1:This is consistent. This is. You know, I rest, I practice quiet time and downtime, I work my butt off and I and I do recreation. So what you do for recreation really depends on kind of how you're built as a person and we all recreate differently. So for a good example, my wife.
Speaker 1:The way that she recreates is with a nonfiction book and taking long baths. So if my wife gets three long baths a week and she's able to read a book and she has some really significant downtime on like a Saturday or a Sunday, she comes into the next week fully charged, fully ready to go. If she misses those things, then she just gets worn down over time. Uh, for me, uh, that does not, uh, refresh me at all, like just, it doesn't help. I like I, I think I like it. I mean, I like baths. Don't take them very often, but they're great. Who doesn't is you actually have to figure out what recreates you, because there's things that you do that fall under the broad category of recreation but specifically for you, you enjoy them but they don't refresh you like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's. It's doing the action for the purpose of recreation, whereas for your wife, the bath is the purpose of recreating, whereas for you, taking a bath would not give you the recreation portion.
Speaker 1:No, I would enjoy it, it would be great, right, right, it might even fall into rest, right, it gives me a little bit of downtime, but it wouldn't fall into recreation, yeah Right, so for you, what, what do you do? What, what is recreation for you?
Speaker 2:Recreation for me would be, um, playing some sort of sport. Specifically at the being on the older side, the most sports that I used to play hurt me, which causes me a different issue. So I play, I play, I play golf. I can play competitive golf, a lot that that stimulates my brain in a way that recreates me in a different way. Or a hunt yeah, that's another one that stimulates my brain in that way, stimulates my brain in that way. Uh, and then also connecting with friends, like hanging out with people and unplugging but still having the stimulation of conversations and interacting and all of those things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so it's interesting because we were talking about this beforehand. I love play, right, I love, I love surfing, I love playing pickleball, I love going to the gym. I love doing all these things. They don't actually, they don't fall under this, this idea of refreshing. For me, they're good and they're healthy and I and I enjoy them.
Speaker 1:But for me, if I want to get recreated, I actually have to have adventure. Right, there's an element of significant challenge or danger, right, it's like one of the jokes is like when we go on vacation, and if we didn't almost die, it wasn't very, it wasn't a great vacation, right, yeah, so, so there's gotta be that element of like I'm in some random country and it's the middle of the night and I'm hiking up a stair, stairway to who knows where, and I'm going to either like find a cool Roman fort, which I did or I'm going to get mugged. But I come home and I'm just like, yes, that was amazing, right, right. The other one for me is nature, especially water. If I'm simply around water, I'm hiking those kind of things. The hike itself, the play part of it is, is fine.
Speaker 1:The, the adventure and the nature part, are the things that are recreative for me. So here's a list of items. So adventure, play, art and imagination, which would be reading, fiction, painting, photography, things like that connection with, with friends, you know, laughter, deep conversation, deep conversation and in nature, and so one of the things for people who are listening. If you're feeling fatigued and you're feeling like you have to slow down on your personal growth and you're resting well, but you're doing stuff, you're like man, this isn't quite it. Try to figure out what it is in these things, like, go do these different things, even as a discipline, if you're not used to adventure, but all of a sudden you think back like 10 years ago when I was on this great adventure, how recreative it was. Start engaging those things intentionally.
Speaker 2:I'm going to challenge you guys out there. If you see Reed and you try to tell him a story about doing something hard and how miserable you were, he's going to give you the response which I think you probably are thinking the same thing of but did you die?
Speaker 1:But did you die? Yes, did you die. Yeah, I'll get a gleam in my eye. I'm thinking that sounds awesome, like that sounds so recreative.
Speaker 2:Right, which is what that's. What you think of with adventure is I didn't die, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so okay. So here's something really important to understand about this idea of recreation, and that is that if I don't do what recreates me, then I will default to what numbs me. And this is a big deal, because if, if you're not doing whatever recreates you, you might find yourself drinking far too much over the course of maybe time, or even just every single day. You might find yourself watching too much TV. You might find yourself scrolling aimlessly through social media. You might find yourself like flipping through, you know, like watching ESPN, and not because it excites you or recreates you, it's just, it's like something to do because it gives you this distance from your life and numbs you. It's just, it's like something to do because it gives you this distance from your life and numbs you, and that can feel a little bit like being recreated, but all it does is give you a reprieve. It gives you a short break, but it doesn't actually build anything. So you got to be careful of that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it puts the wick out on the candle. It doesn't give you a new candle.
Speaker 1:That's exactly right. Yeah, yeah absolutely OK.
Speaker 1:okay, so we're on to number three retooling, sharpening the saw yes, okay, so there are times where you're sleeping well and you're doing enough to to recreate yourself. The reality is is that you actually might not be getting better across areas of your life that cause you to have that feeling of I'm going somewhere, that the feeling of being stuck, the feeling of just like waking up every day in Groundhog's Day, not just because what you're doing is what you do in real estate is very repetitive, just like every other profession. But but if I'm, if I'm doing it over and over again and I'm not actually getting better, I can start to get fatigue. And there's an element of this that if, if you're not going to conferences, you're not reading books, you're not listening to podcasts like the RMG Agent podcast, right, you should listen more.
Speaker 1:Yes, if you're not doing these kind of things, you might be playing or whatever you do to recreate, you might be resting, but you might just have this constant fatigue because you need to challenge yourself and see that you can do something better and or do something in a better way and actually just retool a skill, and this may be in your business, this may be in another area of your life, but it's one of these elements is, if it's not rest and it's not recreation, it is retooling. If it's not retooling, it is rest or recreation. And if you figure out what those things are, you can really sustain growth for a long period of time, right? So what are some ideas or options for retooling?
Speaker 2:Take a course online or locally, yeah, or one of our webinars.
Speaker 1:Yes, I love it.
Speaker 2:That was my corny plug for the day. Okay, so practice a core skill intentionally. So scripts, negotiating, presenting One of the things that's happening in our office. We have some new agents in our office. We're doing scripting and doing some of those things that we were doing a couple years ago. We've already been doing scripting, but back to some of the basics of you know, objection handlers or or deciphering different um objection handlers versus, uh, conditioned responses things that we haven't really done in a while and it's so fun. Yeah, it's super fun getting to sharpen that saw as well as like help somebody else do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so good. And one of the things about retooling right is, you know, if you're, if you're connecting with a mentor or a coach, that can be helped retooling. But just to your point, sometimes retooling is helping somebody new or struggling and realizing, oh I forgot about that tool and you pull it out. You know it's like pulling out your old baseball glove for when you're in high school or college. You're like, oh, there's like the memories and it's you know, all of that stuff.
Speaker 1:So so retooling is really important and one of the things I think is, as a professional, there should be a certain amount of time, effort and money that you spend on your personal development every year, beyond just continuing education, because if you do that, it will. It will encourage you, it will expose you to other people that are doing really big things. Some of that will make you a little bit nervous because you see somebody and you're just like. You start comparing yourself and you get, you know, maybe a little sick to your stomach, but eventually, if you're, if you're doing this with the intention of personally, you know, continuing to grow, it will inspire you right. It will cause your mindset to come around, be like, no like, let me step up. So super, super important to continue to sharpen the saw.
Speaker 1:Okay, Study the best in your field books, podcasts or shadowing yes, yeah, so, um, one of the things that I did for many years I actually still do this is you find somebody in your industry specifically real estate who's doing something awesome and literally just reach out to them. Or, if you have a friend of a friend that can vouch for you, call them up and be like hey, can I, can I buy you dinner and pick your brain right, or can I jump on a plane and come shadow you for a day? The number of people that are unbelievably giving of their time and their talents in our industry is phenomenal. Right and uh, you know, one of the things you might do is you might be intimidated by somebody, but the reality is is if you're the kind of person that's going to show up and really like retool and then maybe pass that on to somebody else, you're going to find a lot of people that are open to help you with this and it's going to be so refreshing as you continue on your personal growth journey.
Speaker 2:I think it's really interesting and pretty unique about our industry in that sense, right Like we've talked about other industries, like professions that have similar pay structures to ours, but very rarely would a lawyer call a competing lawyer and be like, hey, I'd love to come see your strategy on how you deal with this. They're probably gonna say absolutely not, but in our industry you call somebody that does business that you want, you call them, and nine times out of 10, they'll be like, yeah, let's go to lunch, I'll tell you exactly what I'm going to do. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool, all right, and then reflect and adjust journaling and 80-20 analysts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so one of the parts to retooling is really stopping and thinking about what is it that I need in my business? Who is it that I need to be in relationship with? Thinking about that, maybe journaling, taking notes about where you want to go, asking yourself some questions, comparing what you're doing to your business plan. Are my actions and all I mean with what I said, and then I always think that the cheat is figuring out your who. Right, okay, I have this gap in my business. I can go figure out what the education is that I need Really good way to go. But if I can go say who is the best in the world or who do I know that's nailing this that I can go buy dinner for I can buy them plane ticket to fly to me, I can fly to them, right, just massive, huge, huge opportunity.
Speaker 1:So Stephen Covey said sharpen the saw. If you're too busy to improve, you're too busy to succeed. Right, we always want to be improving, and it's kind of this interesting thing because we're talking about what it looks like to sustain personal growth. As it turns out, one of the things that you have to do to sustain personal growth is to continue to grow. So, if you look backwards five years at who you were and then you look at yourself today, hopefully it's like, hey, I can see like there's there's a lot. Maybe there's a lot of challenge, there's a lot of hurdles, but there's a lot of growth. There's a lot. Maybe there's a lot of challenge, there's a lot of hurdles, but there's a lot of growth. There's a lot of advancement. That happens over a five-year period. So if I want to constantly be encouraged and refreshed in my personal growth, I actually have to continue to go out and get the education and things I need to do to sharpen the saw.
Speaker 2:Really, this last quote for you retooling, keeps you relevant. It protects you from drifting into mediocrity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, our world moves so fast. Finding your groove and then just staying there and being cool with it is a great way just to get outmoded really, really quickly, right? So when we look at personal growth, we're growing in a direction where we're following our business plan. We're following our strategy. So this is not the same as just jumping in every new shiny object. We're following our strategy. So this is not the same as just jumping a new, every new shiny object, but it is intentionally saying what's next? What's next? What's next, what's next as we continue to grow?
Speaker 1:So, to zoom all the way back out, if somebody is watching this and their goal is to continue to grow this year right, make more money, have a better marriage, whatever that that looks like as that core focus take a step back and say am I sleeping enough? Am I resting really well? By the way, in your relationships, this really shows up. If you, if you, start getting really really fatigued uh, emotionally and physically and mentally, it starts to mess up your relationships. I, you know, I start to get paranoid like everybody's against me, like the whole world's out against me. It's like like or I need a nap, right?
Speaker 1:A much easier solution, as it turns out, is to take a nap, right If I'm feeling fatigued, and that's being handled well. I got to go do something dangerous. I got to do something scary. My wife has to go take a bath, right. You have to go hit a golf ball right. That's amazing. That's a part of personal growth. And then, obviously, what we just talked about retooling If you look at these three things and you diagnose this and you take action, you will continue on your personal growth journey. Really well, we have a challenge for him here.
Speaker 2:Oh, what is it? Here's our challenge for you this week Schedule a 24-hour window of rest, guilt-free. Do one thing that makes you feel alive Invest in retooling, Read a book, attend a workshop or call a mentor.
Speaker 1:Love it. It's amazing, Even just thinking about that. What would it look like if our listeners took 24 hours guilt free, did something that encouraged them, inspired them, that was fun, just reached out to somebody that was going to encourage them, challenge them, love on them Amazing.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. I'm gonna do this for sure. Love it, okay. Well, that wraps up this episode, uh, which, as always, is great. I love it. Ask me one of the co-hosts. That's right, everybody agrees, everybody agrees, uh, but we have more to come. We're're not done with season three, which is all about personal growth, so stay tuned for our next episode.
Speaker 1:Yes, All right guys, Thanks for being here with us. As always, we are here to impact, empower, encourage you in all things real estate and your personal growth. Take care.