Feeling a bit stuck lately? You're not alone.

Running a fitness studio is a passion, but… hard truth incoming… a passion can also come with its fair share of challenges.

We know this because, as former owners and operators of wellness studios, we found ourselves in loops of burnout and growth plateaus. And once out of it, the next time it happens, the well-worn path in our brains says, “Oh goody, let’s do this all over again!” and it’s even harder to snap out of it the next time.

Our hope is that by putting this experience down on digital paper, it will help you do a few things:

1. See the elephant in the room for what it really is

2. Understand why you’re burnt out in the first place

3. Take action to reinvigorate your passion and leadership

4. Break the cycle so that it doesn’t become habitual

Let’s start with a real-life example from one of our clients.

Sally had $100,000 to invest in opening her fitness studio. She was faced with the following choices:

1. Invest it into a franchise that can support her growth, marketing, and build-out. Or,

2. Create a brand that can be 100% her own so that she can live out her passion.

First, she laid out the pros and cons. She spoke with friends, family, and some trusted financial advisors. She did some research and interviewed people who’ve done both.

She came to the tentative conclusion that she would rather invest her money in her own brand and passion so that she could keep her profits, and control the growth - after all, she had a lot of leadership experience in her full-time job that she felt prepared her for this.

After about a year of being in business, she was not doing as well as she had imagined.

Emotions began to arise, like:

• Fear

• Worry

• Panic

• Shame

• Exhaustion

• Freeze Response

All signs of survival brain in action. And early stages of burnout.

Because of this, our brains look for a way to reduce the pressure. And since Sally’s passion was teaching yoga (because it felt good to help people), she started teaching 10-15 classes a week.

Now she’s feeling good and is working in her business, keeping everything afloat. But the growth in her business became completely stagnant.

So the survival brain started kicking in again… and the cycle starts all over again.

Here’s the cold hard truth: your brain likes dopamine. It likes to feel good.

And when you’re in burnout, there’s some grief and survival feelings that come to the surface that keep you in a loop of trying to constantly find a feeling of neutrality.

So how do you break out of this cycle?

1. First, observe the cycle is actually happening

2. Trust your intuition that you are off balance

3. Remind yourself of the reason why you got started in the first place

4. Steel yourself for your survival response and don’t listen to it (it’s just misguiding thinking)

The first step is to observe yourself living it. Once you see the behaviors in action, you can actually move it from a subconscious pattern to a conscious choice you can push against.

The second step is to trust your intuition. For most part, you know that you are off balance and need to make a change. Whatever you learn within a few weeks or a month meeting with a therapist, having conversations with friends and family, or journaling is enough to show you this. You don’t need a huge awakening.

It’s also important to recognize that when you’re taking steps into an unknown territory, a place that requires you to start building new beliefs, there’s a level of courage that’s needed. Healing may include examining your belief systems and making way for something new. Pick good mentors and critical thinkers to help you here because growth is messy.

The third step is to remind yourself of your why. Write it down on paper - a giant sticky note perhaps - and post it in front of your working space so that you see it every day.

The last step? Steel yourself for the survival response when it comes, and push through. Expect it. Don’t let it tell you you’re going to die if you go against it. You will not.

We speak on this topic with deep experience in making irreversible, emotionally charged, difficult decisions that go against what is ingrained in our beliefs.

It’s tough for us to do this work. To acknowledge the truth of what’s really going on inside of us.

We’ve done it multiple times, and each time… our biggest fear was that we would be unsuccessful or fail and would not be able to undo it. We feared the feeling of regret so much, we stayed stuck in the burnout cycle for a long time…and at the cost of our mental and physical health.

On the other side of burnout, we can tell you…

We didn’t regret it.

We trusted ourselves.

And it made way for us to understand and learn in ways that weren’t possible otherwise.