The Bosshole® Chronicles

Jason Lauritsen - "Teach From Your Scars..." (Part 1)

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Ever wondered how a workplace optimist navigates through the storm of burnout? Join us as we welcome back Jason Lauritsen, who opens up about his profound journey from the brink of exhaustion to a place of renewed strength and purpose. This two-part episode offers an intimate look at how Jason's experiences have shaped his perspectives on leadership and self-care.

Click HERE for Jason's website
Click HERE to connect with Jason on LinkedIn 
Click HERE for Laurie Santos' video "What is Burnout?"
Jason's burnout blog posts:


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John Broer:

Hey, warm welcome to all of our friends out there in the Bossh ole Transformation Nation. This is your co-host, John Broer, and joining me for this wonderful episode. Well, they're always wonderful when I get to work with Sara. Sara Best, how are you doing, Sara?

Sara Best:

John, I am wonderful, excited and I'm celebrating something today. Do you want to know what I'm celebrating?

John Broer:

What are you celebrating?

Sara Best:

The fact that tomorrow is your birthday.

John Broer:

Oh boy.

Sara Best:

And you are a gift. So I just want to say happy birthday and so grateful that I get to work with you.

John Broer:

We won't tell people what that date is because I'm trying to forget it myself, but thank you very much, and a gift I get every day is the chance to work with you. How does that sound? Yeah, nice. Hey, we got a great subject matter expert episode today. This is somebody our listeners have met before coming back for I tell you what is a very powerful two-part episode. So who are we talking to today?

Sara Best:

Our repeat guest subject matter expert is Jason Lauritsen, jasonlauritsen. com. He is a phenomenal human being who has been all about helping leaders cultivate relationships like his work, and you'll be able to tell that he's very passionate about his work. What we're going to hear from Jason today is a bit about his journey, and it struck me that there are these key moments and milestones that any of us should probably be tuning into and even evaluating for ourselves. So he talks about some key things that have happened to him on a journey. You know we're going to address burnout. We're going to be talking about burnout and then coming up with intentional, powerful ways to restore yourself. It's something that I know a lot of people that we work with John are dealing with and maybe even able to identify, but a lot are not. So this is an important episode. Let's dig in.

John Broer:

The Bossh ole Chronicles are brought to you by Real Good Ventures, a talent optimization firm helping organizations diagnose their most critical people and execution issues with world-class analytics. Make sure to check out all the resources in the show notes and be sure to follow us and share your feedback. Enjoy today's episode.

Sara Best:

So, Jason Lauritsen, welcome to the Bossh ole, or I should say, welcome back to the Bossh ole Chronicles.

Jason Lauritsen:

I am delighted to be back. I loved my first time with you, so thank you for the invite.

Sara Best:

And for all of our friends in the Bossh ole Transformation Nation. You should know that Jason is donning the "No One Was Born to Be a Boss Hole t-shirt. That was our thank you gift to him for appearing on his first episode, which was all the way back in October of 2022, where you really outlined this simple yet transformational process, the check-in method. We may even circle back to that or talk about that today, because you're a workplace optimist. You think about relationship as the key to good leadership. There's a whole methodology you've developed and it's really effective. So we've kept in touch and I learned that you were going to be speaking at Work Human Live in Austin, texas.

Sara Best:

That took place in April, alongside Brene Brown and some other important names, and while I was attending Work Human Live, I noticed that you were quite busy. You had two giant sessions. You actually covered a session for somebody that couldn't make it, so you just did yours again, a great audience and you were very busy connecting with all kinds of leaders during this week. You and I didn't even get a chance to say hello formally during that week because you were pretty tied up, which is amazing. We connected a couple weeks after that just to talk about the conference and how it was for you, and we shared some of our takeaways and some of our experiences. And in that conversation I learned that you came at this experience at Work Human Live very differently.

Sara Best:

In your session in Work Human Live you talked about your upbringing. You grew up on a farm in Iowa. That was really effective, by the way. If we get to some of that, that would be kind of fun. But in our conversation you helped me understand what caused you to come to this Work Human Live conference, very differently than other engagements and other things you've done in the past, and it was really powerful. You shared your journey over the last number of years, some things you realized about burnout and finding yourself in a place of, I don't know, darkness, concern, scariness, and we thought that would be a powerful opportunity for you to share this with our listeners in the Bossh ole Transformation Nation. So, Jason, take us back. Can you kind of dive in and tell us about the road you walked and why this experience in Austin this year was so different and also what's resulted from it?

Jason Lauritsen:

Wow, there's a lot there. First off, thanks for the invitation to do this. It's really interesting when you and I talked post Work Human Live and reconnected. I think one of the things I shared with you was that I had recently read, in another one of the many email newsletters I get from the thought leaders or teachers that I follow, a guy by the name of Jeff Warren. He quoted in one of his notes some wisdom from a teacher of his that was teach from your scars, not from your wounds.

Jason Lauritsen:

And I am at a place, I think, finally, where my burnout and recovery from burnout are scars. I am post-recovery. I am back whole and full, and that has a lot to do with how I was able to show up at work human. I'm also improved, I think, better than I was before the experience in some ways in terms of just how my relationship with myself and my work.

Jason Lauritsen:

But I will say that, interestingly, I did a lot of writing and sharing and speaking about burnout while I was in the middle of it, so I was trying to teach from my wounds, which was really interesting to go back and revisit and take a look at, and so this invitation to have this conversation was a great invitation for me to really do some reflection I'd been wanting to do, to sort of think about what are the lessons that I've learned, and I think there's a lot of things that I would love to chat about here, um, in a minute, about some things I I got wrong along the way, and I think some of that is born out of the narrative, the sort of quick fix mindset we have about burnout in a lot of organizations and a lot of stuff in pop culture right now that you're reading about, and so, all that to say, I would love to tell you a little bit about the journey and then perhaps we can unpack the things I got wrong, the things I know now and the things that were helpful for me.

Jason Lauritsen:

And so the story goes back. The story starts, as it probably does for a lot of people, in 2020. For me, obviously, 2020 arrived, Covid arrived, and as someone who is a speaker, someone who travels for a living to speak at conferences and visit organizations overnight, my business completely transformed, as it did for a lot of us, but much of the work that I was paid to do went away immediately and I had to reinvent and so, but I am the kind of person that never met a challenge that I wasn't up for.

Jason Lauritsen:

So I put my head down and just went at it. Right, I'm like no time to cry about this, right, the world has changed. I know how to change. I can pivot, and so I did. And so I did a bunch of different things. I changed my business in a variety of different ways. I started grabbing a bunch of wherever I could find ways to contribute and make an impact and find ways to create value in different ways. I did that and that was great and actually I was reasonably successful at that. But it was like there was no time for mourning, no time for resting, no time for anything. Put your head down and go. We all remember that. At the same time right, we're dealing with I was also headmaster of the Lurtson School for Gifted Children during that time.

Jason Lauritsen:

You know, when the kids were sent home for school, I was the homeschool parent and so I ran that show. Then, on top of trying to do this and your social structures all ripped away and all these things, and then fast forward to about August of that year and it was, it was time to send our kids back to school, back to in-person school. And we live in a sort of a town that is a suburb of Omaha over whether they should wear masks or not and all that kind of stuff, and we got involved in that because it felt like you had to and we were trying to decide what to do. And that decision, really and I wrote a blog post in August of 2020 called Sending my Kids Back to School Broke Me, and it was at that moment that I realized it was sort of whatever reason it was, that experience, that decision, the intensity of that that I finally kind of hit the wall, the proverbial wall, and I realized I was not okay. And it wasn't just me, I mean, I started. I had friends that were reaching out to me, um, that that were kind of like are you okay? You know that kind of we're in in lots of people checking in with each other, and I realized, like no, I am not okay. Um, and and actually I'll say the other thing that happened during that same time is I knew I wasn't okay, but I didn't know quite what was going on, and I remember distinctly sitting the moment that it became clear to me, I think what was, how bad it was is.

Jason Lauritsen:

I remember sitting on my couch working on a- I know exactly what it was, I was going to get for my webcast. I was going to get the opportunity to interview Gary Hamill. Gary Hamill's like an intellectual hero of mine. I've been following his work forever. I mean this was a big deal. If I made a list of people that I wanted to talk to, wanted to interview, he would have been like a top three, top five kind of person. So this is huge for me. So one of my tasks was I needed to write up the sort of description, the marketing description, so that we could promote this conversation I'm going to get to have with Gary Hamill. And so, like you would think, this should be one of those tasks that I should be just full of energy for, excited about, and and I remember sitting there just feeling nothing, emotionally flatline.

Jason Lauritsen:

And then I started to realize that I had stopped feeling anything pretty much all the way throughout my life. Like this emotional flatline was everywhere. It was like I didn't have the highs and lows like with my kids and I'm like a really like I love being a dad, it's my favorite job and even that I just wasn't feel like everything had flatlined, sort of. And that's when I realized that was kind of the first step towards realizing, yeah, I am, I'm burned out, I didn't know. I started doing some research and reading and kind of figuring out what it was and I realized I was in burnout. So then I started searching like what do you do? And that kind of thing. And one of the friends, one of my friends, suggested to me that I take said, just can you find some time to disconnect, like to really like disconnect from everything and take some time off to you know a little bit of time off? And I was like sure I can do that. And so I found like four days or whatever, and um, I went away. My parents happened to be traveling at the time, so I went. Their house was empty, so I traveled up, hung out in my parents' house by myself for four days, did a bunch of you know, resting and reflection and meditating and all the things right. I retreated. I went to a retreat and I did all of this stuff and I realized I had some mindset issues and I had gotten into a scarcity mindset and I was able to kind of shift through some of that. I did some values, work, you know, all these things that were designed to kind of help and they did in the short run. I came back after my four days I felt very different. Um, I was able to make some, some decisions and shifts, and uh and on, I went right, dropped right back into it, put my, put my feet back on the treadmill and off I went, and then it was. I think I was okay and I wrote about. You know then, like, of course, from my wounds I was writing, cause I thought they were scars at the time I didn't realize. I wrote some stuff about how I you know what I did, how I put myself back together and I had all of this advice about what you can do, and some of it is still like it's helpful.

Jason Lauritsen:

And then, even in 2021, I, you know, months later, I'm writing a post about the other side of burnout, and these are all on my blog. By the way, that's where I was. So it's like journaling out loud. And at the time, I was doing it because the narrative was we're not okay, mental health right. Remember how, pre- 2020, nobody was talking about mental health at work? You couldn't almost. And so a big piece of it is like how do you role model? How do we de-stigmatize? Well, part of it is you got to talk about it out loud. I had never had a mental health issue in my life. I didn't know, I didn't understand it, I didn't know what was happening, I didn't know how to deal with it, and so I was just I'm like I'm going to write about it because hopefully, that gives other people permission to investigate their own life and maybe get you know, go on their own journey. And so, in 2021, I wrote about what it felt like to be on the other side and what I was doing. And then, and I just kept going right, kept going and kept going, and kept going. Well then 2022 comes around, August of 2022 hits and I realize, oh no, here I am again. That emotional flatline showed up again and I was like, oh, and so dust off the playbook, pull out the playbook, went on, retreat for a few days, did the thing came back after a few days of that, felt okay. Did the thing came back after a few days of that, felt okay, jumped back on the treadmill off. I went Wow. And then, because I thought I was healed, I had the playbook. I know how to do this. Surely I've got this figured out. I even wrote blog posts about it. Certainly I must have it figured out. And so we get to fast forward then into 2023.

Jason Lauritsen:

And the first part of 2023, business was hard. We were struggling with some things, some stuff that should have worked or we thought should have worked wasn't, and we just couldn't figure it out. And that was in a business relationship at the time then that we were trying to figure this stuff out together and that was creating all kinds of tension. And then I realized I needed, like I wasn't in a good place again. I was starting to struggle again, but I figured it was because of the business was hard. And so I made some decisions and you know some things to kind of resolve some of the issues. And and then once I did a little bit of that, I kind of put some things down, made some hard decisions, and so I had a bit of space.

Jason Lauritsen:

And then in that space I started to realize like whoa I am, I'm not in a good way, and this was like I could feel, like I finally had space to pay attention, and I realized I was in bad shape again.

Jason Lauritsen:

Um, I was so exhausted. The emotional exhaustion, the emotional flatline thing was there, um, but this time something happened. Like I didn't. I knew I was, I thought I was probably headed that direction, and then an email showed up in my inbox. That was an email from Big Think, which is another of the emails that I follow, and it was a video from Dr Laurie Santos about burnout. Seven minute video. And that video is really what finally set me on my path of true recovery. And so I'm going to draw a breath there because I've been talking for quite a while. But I'm going to draw a breath there to see if you have questions about that, because I can talk about what I learned in that video and why that video was so transformative for me, but I want to pause. So if you want to jump in, you can and not have to jump over me.

John Broer:

Well, thank you, Jason, for sharing this, because that is very powerful and something that you said. I've been writing things down because I want to remind all of our listeners. Go into the show notes. We're not only going to have Jason's original episode but we'll link to your blog posts and also Dr Laurie Santos. I think that would be and we're going to hear about that.

John Broer:

But something you said about a quick fix mindset and I think that's inherent in well, in how we're wired. Maybe that's just sort of interesting about the workplace here in the U. S., a lot of people have a quick set, quick fix mindset and just thinking, well, I'll take a little bit of time and or I'll, I'll use this technique or this resource and I'll be all okay. And it rarely fully works. It really, it rarely takes. It takes more time and I think that's what I'm hearing you say is that I really needed to detox and detach and you started to see this repeating and then it sounded like you came to the realization that something else had to happen. But I'm just sort of reflecting on what you've shared and I think that's very powerful. I bet you there are listeners right now going that is exactly what I'm going through right now. That's what's happening.

Sara Best:

I'm struck by- you're a consultant. I don't think it matters what you do that there is this potential to find yourself in this place. So I think about leaders too that just kind of keep going and may not even realize. So I appreciate your self-awareness. You know that you had the ability to tune into your emotions. It also makes me think how important emotions are, their data points, and there's two parts to that. The first is can I understand what I'm feeling? Can I be with that feeling? Can I kind of walk through that feeling and understand why I feel the way I do? And then how about when you arrive at a point where there isn't feeling, there's no emotion or numbness?

Sara Best:

I actually just was working with the group yesterday and one of the leaders said I don't feel anything. I don't feel anything. And it was the first time she articulated that out loud and in a similar situation to yours, Jason. I think she realized I'm just walking around here, all the stuff I love to do. It doesn't mean anything to me right now and that's a huge warning sign. That's a huge warning sign. So your self-awareness something we should all take note of, like what are we doing to tune into ourselves, and also being aware and open to you didn't stop listening to videos or writing or working, and through that you found the guidepost for the next thing. So, yeah, let's hear about the video. What did you take away from that and what did it inspire you to do?

Jason Lauritsen:

One thing I'll add is that an important part of the story that I've mentioned but I think is really, really important, is that the self-awareness only followed, sort of others saying you're not okay or are you okay?

Jason Lauritsen:

Or hey you should really think about taking care of yourself, and the irony of that and I think particularly for leaders that are the type A super achievers, like I have been for most of my life is that we always tell ourselves we're fine, we're fine, we can get through. I've been through, I've done hard things, it's fine, and so we just keep going and we keep going and we keep going and we index towards. At least one of the things I realized through my process is that for me, my, my growing up and Sara back to that growing up on the farm when you grow up on a farm like one of the things that is prized extraordinarily highly is work ethic.

Jason Lauritsen:

And so for me, the solution to everything is just work harder, if you like. If I just apply more work effort, I can get through it. And that actually is like shoveling yourself deeper in the hole, and it's also you get so myopically focused on. I can get through this right, that rugged individualism, bootstrap nonsense that we've all kind of been indoctrinated into, that we can do this on our own. We just got to be motivated enough.

Jason Lauritsen:

Also makes it hard to hear the people that care for you most when they're sending signals up saying, hey, I'm worried about you. And so it was the invitation from people that cared about me that I could hear, that I respected, that said yeah, I'm worried about you, like you need to, you need to tune into this. And then I started paying attention and then I was able to kind of have the awareness to like pick up on, like whoa, I am really not okay, like even when they first told me that. So just be aware, like pay attention to the people around you, because they know your burnout way before you do, they know that something's off way before you do, and so it's really important to be open and to be hearing that. So just a caveat to add on to that. I don't want to give myself too much credit. It was the people around me that really saved me.

Sara Best:

Well, the takeaway right there, Jason, is if you see something, say something. You know not to be trite, but, you know, have the courage and the respect and love for your colleagues or your family members to say I'm not sure you're okay. So that's huge.

John Broer:

Yeah, it is, if I may, too, before we we, before we go on to Dr Santos' video and what it meant to you, I had this image in my head as you were sharing that story of the change curve and this is something we use at Real Good Ventures when we're talking about the change we go through. And in the change curve there is that dip and there is really this almost like a vortex where people can get stuck and it's busy. Maybe there's a quick-fix mindset and it's like okay, we're going to work our way out of this, Keep going. And that absolutely wears on people. So that was an image that just came to mind. And then the other thing I think you said grief, jason. I think you talked about grieving and that really struck me because when COVID hit, I know Sara, you and I, we immediately shifted into resilience mode for our clients.

John Broer:

I mean we were working and I mean multiple times during a week, working with leadership teams and functional teams, helping them navigate this, and thinking about how do we, how can we maintain resilience in a very different world, and did we really take time to grieve over the life that ended in the beginning of 2020? I've never thought about it that way and not to get I mean I think that's very relevant. Did we really take time to grieve and reflect and prepare ourselves for what is going to be a new reality and we're in that now? I mean we are in that, but I think you've given me a way of looking at it in a very different way. Did people even really have the time or the space to grieve after that happened?

Jason Lauritsen:

Yeah, ironically in my first retreat that I went on, I remember very vividly I went on a long run one afternoon and I was listening to a lot of as one does when one is trying to sort things out like this you go to Brene Brown, and so I was listening to Brene Brown podcasts, and one of them was about grief, and it was really interesting at the time to be sort of thinking about that for me, because that was part of where I think I was stuck, and I think you're right, john, I've thought about that a lot over the last several years.

Jason Lauritsen:

I think part of the reason that we are in this collective moment of we have a lot, I think and a lot is an understatement, probably of unresolved trauma, probably of unresolved trauma which is why we talk about there's a mental health crisis and there's all of this stuff that is out there. I think a big part of that is because we never allowed ourself time to grieve the world that was and is no more. I think you see that at work a ton right. This is why I think we're seeing.

Jason Lauritsen:

Part of the reason we have so much burnout at work is that we're living in a world where the old version of work is dead, but yet we have a whole bunch of leaders and people in the organization that are in denial, still right, they're still in the first phase, they're not moving through the grief to let it go, and so they're still clinging on to the notion that this can't really be happening. Like this can't be happening. We can just go back right. Surely they're just going to show up at my door one of these days. They can't be gone, and so there's this clinging that goes on and that requires an enormous amount of emotional energy and it's very confusing, and I mean we all have seen people that are moving through grief right and in that first part of the process, denial is really really heavy and hard and taxing and I think so. I think like it's a huge issue and it was certainly part of the process for me.

Sara Best:

Well, let's just note too that the stages of grieving are in fact the change curve. The change curve model was derived from Dr Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's stages of grief. It's really the same thing, and whether it's even a good change. There were some good things that came out of this incredible shift, but there's still a loss of what we knew or what we anticipated we would know. So good, call out there.

Jason Lauritsen:

So this video, what happened for me when this video showed up? So I was sitting there and I knew I was struggling. The video showed up, I click into the video, I'm watching the video and it just happened to be Dr Santos that is sharing this, but she's basically unpacks the fact that burnout. So there's the burnout that we talk about. Everybody talks about being burnout, there's a lot of burnout it's become very, very common to use that phrase but that there is a clinical syndrome that is called burnout that they diagnose and treat and that has three specific symptoms. And so it really like she going through this. So the three symptoms are emotional exhaustion, which is that's the emotional flatline, right, it's not just about feeling tired, but feeling like you, like the way she described it, I think is like feeling like you cannot emotionally handle another thing on your plate, right, and it's that emotional flatline. You just like emotional exhaustion, right? No energy emotionally. Then there is which obviously check the box.

Jason Lauritsen:

I danced in and out of that for three and a half years. Then there was depersonalization, which often manifests as cynicism. So it's kind of like you're on a short fuse with people, you get cynical about people's intentions, and this one is the one that really, for me, I was like, oh no, because I remember, if I go back a year last summer, I was like, oh no, because I remember, um, if I go back a year last summer, I remember what would happen. Um, it's like I'm an idea guy and so my, you know, I'm always like, and I'm always able to kind of think about.

Jason Lauritsen:

You know, historically it's, one of my talents is I can connect to dots that most people don't connect, and that's why I do what I do and I see possibilities where others don't. And so my wife would you know, generally when she was through her work, would have like, she needs to think about an idea or think through something. She would bring it to me and we would, and I'd, we'd bounce around some ideas, and I remember last summer a couple of times where she would say, okay, help me think about this, and I would start talking, and we'd get about a minute or a minute and a half into it and she'd be like, yeah, I don't want to talk about it anymore.

Jason Lauritsen:

Like she would get so frustrated so fast, and it was because everything coming out of my mouth was more cynicism and sort of the bad side. Right, she's like, yeah, this isn't helpful. And then I had a moment last summer where I was having a networking call, which I do these all the time and I love meeting new people and connecting. And I was having this networking call and I just remember this woman's telling me about her. You know, I don't know. She was telling me something about her business and I just remember, like I was, so I'm like and I was, I was cynical, I was pushing back, I was whatever. And I got off this call and I'm like who was that guy? I'm like I wouldn't want to ever have another conversation with that guy.

Jason Lauritsen:

If I was her, I could see it on her face as we're having this and I'm like what is wrong with me? So I knew that was happening. I could feel it with my I was short patience, all of that. So depersonalization, that's the second thing. And then the third thing is what she described as personal ineffectiveness, and so it's that it's kind of a loss of efficacy, a loss of feeling of confidence, so feeling that even if you do your job well, it doesn't really matter.

Jason Lauritsen:

And it's not the same as what you do have done in the past, and I remember distinctly feeling that I was good at faking it. I had come to pride myself on hard work and the ability to push through things. And so, even when I'm in the midst of this struggle, I can show up and dazzle in a webinar, right cause that's a performance. Or I can go speak with a. I can do a performance, but then I'm just you know, and even then it's a performance. It wasn't sort of the I didn't. There wasn't the genuineness or the probably spirit of it that it normally would have had, but I could get through it.

Jason Lauritsen:

I'm really good at what I do. So even when I'm not at full power, I'm still pretty effective, and so I able kind of faked my way through it, but my confidence was diminished, my belief in things was diminished. I'm like why am I doing this? I can't seem to figure anything out. I would talk about my business when I was talking. I'm like my business is a dumpster fire, blah, blah, blah. It was all these things that shows up everywhere. And so I was like, oh my goodness. So like, not only am I burnout like I am, I am serious, hardcore, clinically check the box burnout, not the burnout that people say when they don't like their job or they're tired of dealing with their moron boss or whatever, or they just are yeah, their boss hole their job or they're tired of dealing with their moron boss or whatever, or they just are, yeah, their Boss hole.

Jason Lauritsen:

So that's when it really I was like okay, boy, I'm really I'm not just burnout, I'm really really burnout this time.

John Broer:

A big thank you to Jason Lauritsen for sharing at least part one of his journey through burnout. Make sure you tune in next week when we will hear the full measure of Jason's story about how he dealt with and moved through and emerged from this period of burnout. We'll see you next week.