Welcome to another exciting episode of the Wake to Wealth show, where we explore the journey of successful entrepreneurs and business experts, and uncover the secrets to their success.
Today, we have a very special guest with us, Cara Barone, a nervous system business coach who helps entrepreneurs and professionals overcome burnout and overwhelm.
Joining us as the host for this episode is the talented Pam Obasa, who will be leading the discussion with Cara and diving deep into the topic of “The Fastest Way To Stop Burnout & Overwhelm.”
If you’re an entrepreneur or professional struggling with burnout and overwhelm, this episode is a must-watch.
Cara’s expertise and insights, coupled with Pam’s expert guidance, will provide you with practical strategies to overcome these challenges and take your career to the next level.
So sit back, relax, and let’s dive in!
Pam: Hello and welcome to the show, Cara Barone. I’m so excited to have you here.
Thank you so much for joining me.
I’m not going to butcher your intro because I think what you do is amazing. I want to give you the opportunity to share with our audience, just a quick intro to introduce yourself before I dive into the questions for today.
I am so excited about this conversation because I think that your story is something that we as entrepreneurs can all relate to.
Cara: My name is Cara, I’m a nervous system business coach. And why I say that, I think I’ve coined that term. But I actually moved from a business coach focusing on strategy and mindset to nervous system work. And so I really help high performers now.
So those type-A go-getters, heal the hustle. So heal how we work, how we earn, and how we lead because we’ve all adopted this masculine go, go, go world. And as females, we don’t have male hormones that reset every 24 hours.
We are supposed to learn how to go flow more and be nurturers and caretakers. And after a whole load of chronic health issues and burnout, I had to learn how to work with my body and my energy. And I literally had to learn an entirely different way to make money after I was benched for a really long time. So that’s why I help now. And that’s a little bit of my journey.
Pam: I want to take you back to before you switch niches before you became the nervous system business coach, which I absolutely love.
What led you to burnout?
Can you just talk about some of the things that happened that made you feel burned out?
Cara: So I’ll probably take it all the way back to when I was living in San Francisco.
So I was a consultant at LinkedIn, and I was working all the time. Not because we had to, I was a workaholic, and I was so driven by the accolades and climbing the corporate ladder. And frankly, I wanted to make people happy.
I liked speaking on stage and doing all the things and feeling really well accomplished and doing a good job. And that’s not a bad thing until it gets to a point when you don’t know how to rest. And at the time, I had no idea.
I was in my 20s, I was just running around Silicon Valley doing all the cool things. And then I moved to London, and that’s when I actually started having chronic health issues.
And at the time, I was juggling my nine-to-five. I became an online health coach because my health was getting so bad. I was like, Oh, I should do this health coach thing. Let me figure out my health. From there, I was like, I’m not a health coach.
I have business in me, business consulting. So I became a business coach.
So I helped corporate women bring their skills online. I was helping hundreds of women at the time from various countries bring their skills online, start and grow. And my health kept deteriorating worse and worse and worse.
When I was living in London, I was allergic to lettuce. So it got really bad before it got worse.
Turns out I had bowl poisoning from living there. Some crazy stories I have for you all.
I didn’t know what was wrong with me for many years.
If I really get honest myself, that low-grade stress, the people pleasing, building a business all this time. It was that constant achieving, constantly being on, constantly working. I felt fulfilled. And I was travelling to a new country every month. I was doing cool things on the outside. But inside I was like: ‘Wow, this is really hard.’ And deep down, I worry a lot. I have a lot of anxiety and I have a lot of fear.
But I didn’t present it that way. I presented confidence and served and did all these things. I thought it was right.
We think it’s normal to inside feelings that inside feel stressed. So after many years of doing that and serving many clients, it became too much for my body and it went completely the opposite end.
I was like, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, to not going to work anymore. Organ shutdown, breathing lower, all the things.
Pandemic happened. I moved to Australia. I couldn’t really get out of bed some days.
And this is a true definition of burnout.
You have apathy, you don’t care about the things you used to care about.
And really in the mental health world, we label it as depression or mental health issues.
I want to share, if you’re listening to this and like: ‘Wow, I feel like I’m on the edge of that burnout thing’.
It’s actually your nervous system in your body saying, I’m really tired. So I went through all these things, and then I just tried to nurse myself back. And I learned I had to heal some of these deeper, driving forces and learn a different way to do it, learn how to sell and market and launch in ways that my body wanted, in ways that were not stressful.
So that’s been the journey.
Pam: I can definitely resonate with so much of that. `Not to its extremities, but as a busy woman myself and as a mom, absolutely, I have felt certain things that you have shared. So can you take us back? You did touch on this, but just to really highlight, what is burnout?
What is your definition of burnout?
Cara: I think burnout is after living with chronic or low-grade stress period for a long period of time when your body can’t do it anymore, and you start to go into a nervous system state of freeze where your body will actually feel stuck.
And after that happens, your body will say: ‘I have no more energy’.
And it goes into an immobilized state where things just start shutting down.
Pam: Wow. That is scary.
Cara: When I pivoted, I want to say most entrepreneurs reached out to me and said: ‘I have been there’. And I didn’t know I was laying in my bed, my hormones weren’t working, my thyroid wasn’t working, and I was sad.
Pam: Wow. Okay, follow up on the question from that.
What are some signs that we need to look out for before we hit zero?
How do we mitigate this ahead of time? What are some things that you would say, maybe three to five things to look out for?
Cara: Excellent question.
So especially if you’re a high performer, you’re like: ‘I’m not going to slow down. Why would I do that?’
So there are really 2 phases before you get there.
So the first phase is, if you are working right now with a lot of anxiety or overwhelmed, or everything feels urgent, there are fires every single day, and by the end of the day, you’re feeling exhausted, brain fog wiped out. That’s a really good sign you’re in a sympathetic fight or flight state and you need to start bringing in more peace, and calm.
I worked here for 25, almost 30 years. People can do it for a long period of time but know that that’s your first sign that you’re probably moving towards a burnout period.
So just watching towards the end of the day if you have time with some of those things that I’m saying.
And then the next phase will be if you’re feeling in that really stuck energy, so procrastination, overthinking, ruminating thought, a lot of back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. You could feel that in your body, right? I should do that, but I can’t. Those are really good signs that your nervous system is going through different states.
And then if you have to take the whole weekend to recover and you’re just so fatigued and exhausted, listen to your body. It’s actually telling you something.
Pam: Is there anything that you can share that we can say somebody’s reading this and they want to do this right now, perhaps they’re in the car and they’re feeling nervous and they want to…
Is there something that you can give that you can share with us that we can use as a tool today?
Cara: So some of the tools that are absolutely best are tools you actually already have, but we usually don’t monitor our energy.
So for example, if you are feeling very energetic. If that’s the state that you’re in, it typically means you have too much energy and you want to get rid of it a bit.
So that could be maybe you do a dance party, maybe you do some jumping jacks. You do anything like I’m just punching in the air. You do that to get rid of the energy so you come on a little bit calmer. Because what it actually is, if I was to give you examples of why that’s happening, your system is saying, Oh, this is dangerous. The tiger or the lion is right next to me. I need to move. I need to run. So that would be one example.
If you’re on that side. Or if you’re on the other extreme side, you’re in that like, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to get out of bed. You could tell the extreme, right? Oh, my gosh. I have nothing left. That means your system is immobilized.
You don’t have much energy. So you want to add a little bit. So a really beautiful example of this might be just going outside and get the sun on your face.
So actually think about your own tools that you do. It might be like putting your hair up. It might be putting on some lipstick. Small energy movers for when you’re feeling really down. Big energy movers for when you feel like you have too much energy.
Pam: What was the time when you realised that: ‘Wow, I’m actually waking up wealthier every day and I’m not burned out?’ What is the story behind that?
Cara: I think for me, it had to be the rock bottom.
I was waking up wealthy and I realized it wasn’t worth it if I didn’t have my health.
So I went from one extreme to I don’t care about this money if I don’t feel great in my body.
And then when I woke up to that was actually probably recently as I relaunched my Signature program, as I was working with one on one clients, and I’m like: ‘Wow, the world needs this because how you make money matters so much more than just the money that you make.
Pam: So we have come to the final part, which is our wildcard moment, Cara.
Wild card is a series of questions. So I have five questions, Cara has no idea what these questions are, and they are questions that we have picked up from our community and questions that I know that Cara will have answers to.
So, Cara, all you have to do is choose a number between 1 and 5, and I will ask you that question.
Cara: Okay, let’s go with 2.
Pam: Number two? Okay. Number two is:
When it comes to creating your Signature Program without getting burned out, do you advise people to start creating a High Ticket Offer or a Low Ticket Offer?
Which one is best to start off with without feeling burnt out and overwhelmed?
Cara: I just relaunched my Signature program and I’m a High-Ticket girl.
I would rather work with your clients, more in depth, especially because I burned down my Instagram of 16,000 followers. I started new. I had 1,000 people I launched through.
I probably don’t have the audience for something where I’m going to sell a $100 offer for 100 people. So I’m going to sell something for 4K or 5K, help fewer people. And it’s going to be such a win-win for everyone.
Pam: Yeah, love that. I’m a High-Ticket girl, too. So I love it. Brilliant. We have time for one more question. So we’ve had question two. Do you want to pick another number between one and five?
Carra: Ok, number 4.
Pam: Number 4 is:
What are your top tips for starting out as a coach?
Cara: This is great.
- Clarity on who you’re serving?
- Confidence in your offer.
And you won’t have either of those.
So it is then backing yourself no matter what.
Things will come up and you will feel like an imposter at every level. I help people from starting to 7 figures, you will always feel like an imposter.
So how can you find evidence from your past when it was really hard when you had no idea what you were doing and pull from that experience, bring it forward?
I call that looking at your credibility markers because you’ve done things in your past before that you had zero ideas how to do and you made it work.
So you’re going to constantly be facing this evolution.
And the faster you can fail and pull on your experience that you’ve made things work before, you will make it work again.
This entrepreneurial world is all made up anyways, so make it work for you.
Pam: So clarity in who you serve, confidence in your offer, but most importantly is backing yourself no matter what.
And I love what you said about credibility markers. And when you said that, I wrote down receipts.
Show yourself the receipts because you have them.
You’ve gathered these receipts from your personal life, your other things that you have done.
And one question that I often have, people, ask me is: ‘Pam, I don’t have testimonials for this specific offer, but I have testimonials in this area. Can I use it?’
I’m like: ‘Yes, of course, you can’.
Because it’s still you and you are still the same person and you can leverage your experiences and your credibility from other walks of life into where you are right now.
So, get hold of these tools and really get to work so that we can not only create a business that is lucrative, but it has to also come at you on your own terms.
You’ve got to be able to enjoy life and do business in a fun way that works for you.
Cara, thank you so much. It has been a blast.
I have learned so many new things, actually, because we’ve been talking about other things beyond just the making money part. These are the things that actually help you to make even more money. So thank you so much. It has been wonderful to have you.
Cara: Thank you so much for having me.
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