Making It – Episode 169
Making It Without Burnout: Lessons from 5 Years Off (Michelle Falzon)
Michelle Falzon: I’m Michelle Falzon and you’re listening to Making It. I run a strategic marketing consultancy called We Are Content and we help authors, speakers, coaches, consultants to leverage their ideas into a profitable and sustainable business.
I really grew up in a blue collar family and my parents had four kids. My parents were divorced when I was 11 and I was a good Catholic kid and nobody got divorced at those times. So I felt like a bit of a pariah, a bit of an outcast. My dad worked two jobs so they could pay off the mortgage, you know, that kind of thing. Thinking about experiences from my childhood, a whole bunch of things just flashed before my eyes. What kind of things did influence me, what led me to where I am now?
I think I was always a storyteller. I was always interested in writing stories. I was an early reader. And one of the things that probably really influenced me from a very young age is my grandmother teaching me words. She loved words, and she was a Scrabble player, and we did word puzzles together her whole life. And I absolutely just loved it. And it became a thing between us. She gave me my first dictionary. It was an illustrated dictionary, a big dictionary for kids. And I loved that dictionary.
And I found words so interesting and fascinating, it became a bit of a running joke in my family that I would, even as a little kid, come up with precocious words for things. I remember my grandmother saying, oh, it’s really wet outside. And I said, nan, it’s saturated. And the whole family breaking up laughing. And I was like, what’s so funny? And so I think I had an affinity with words from the beginning. My grandfather had been very entrepreneurial. My grandmother gave me the words.
My grandfather gave me a model for what it looked like to have your own business. He was a builder, and he would build houses, like buy blocks of land, build houses and then sell the built, you know, unit together. And I guess he was a great example of that. And I guess I just followed my nose and I was on more of a creative journey than an entrepreneurial journey. But over time, I realized that entrepreneurship is incredibly creative and that I did have these sort of mix of analytical and creative skill sets. And that actually when you fuse those things together, that’s when you can achieve incredible things.
I remember in high school, a high school teacher once giving me an award. And it was the weirdest award. It was for having the energy and enthusiasm that most people in this school lack. That’s what he had written on the award. And it just stuck with me. I was like, oh, I have energy and enthusiasm that was noticeable in a crowd. It was the first time I really kind of understood that. And so when I think about this golden thread of storytelling and communicating in words and how it has woven through my life and even my earliest jobs, it’s kind of always been there, you know, how you can sort of join the dots. Looking back, you can see, oh, wow, I see how that all connects.
So when I finished high school, I went to America as an exchange student. I’ve always felt this affinity with America. And so I was this young kid, my first trip overseas and I spent a year living in the us it was fantastic. And when I came back, I was really interested in being a journalist and I wanted to go to university. And I was going to go to this particular college that was renowned for journalism here in Australia because I’d done the American school year. The Australian school year is different. It’s January to December. You know, I kind of got home in the middle of the year and I had about six or seven months before I was going to go back to university.
So I took a job with a documentary making company.And there’s a really interesting story that goes with that. I came home and I got a welcome home card from a high school friend of mine. And in it he included a brochure of where he was working. And it was this fantastic film production studio and editing suites. I remember so clearly. I was reading the card on my bedroom floor. I stood up, I walked down the hall. This was before mobile phones. I walked down the hall past my mom, heading to the phone in the kitchen. As I walked past my mom, I said, mom, I’m about to make a phone call that’s going to change my life. And she’s like, oh, that’s good, you know.
And I went and made the call. I called my friend who’d just sent me the welcome home card, and I said, hey, I’m home for like six months. I need some work experience in this kind of field for my job. Would you consider having me come along and be an internal. And within a few days I was out on film shoots and I was doing everything, holding cameras, pinning down cables and holding up cue cards, et cetera. And I loved it because it’s storytelling and I love documentary making. That’s why I wanted to get into journalism.
And so within six months, when it came time to leave, they had a farewell party for me. The week that I was leaving to go to university, this company won a multimillion dollar grant from the Australian government to make a documentary series. And they offered me a job on this documentary series. And I was like, okay, I’ll defer uni for a year. And I never looked back.
And so when I traced that little golden thread, making films, telling stories was always there. After a while, that business evolved into an advertising agency where we were doing television commercials and radio commercials. Fast forward a few years. The Internet really came into its own. And I was a very early adopter of telling stories on the Internet and email marketing. I spent a lot of time running a business where we were bringing in speakers from the U.S. they were speakers with intellectual property, with ideas. They were coaches, they were authors. We very quickly were filling rooms and running early tele seminars and things like that.
And early 2000s, it got a little bit harder to fill those rooms. More people jumped in on the bandwagon. Even before it was called content marketing, we realized we had to start doing more before somebody would commit to coming along to an event or signing up for a program. So we were doing early content marketing before it was a thing, making mini ebooks or courses that were free, telling more stories and interviewing our speakers. This was in the early 2000s. I guess that all led together to what I’m doing now, which is helping, you know, global coaches, authors and speakers, people who have intellectual property, people who have ideas, and turning those into not only powerful stories and powerful products that reach and help people and ignite movements and change and growth, but also that do it in a profitable way.
So I guess when I look back, there’s another golden thread, which is about not just telling stories and communicating, but doing it in a way that’s sustainable, profitable, and strategic. This kind of left and right brain, you know, creative strategic is really something that I can see, I’ve used all my life in the work that I do. One of those collective strands that I’ve woven together is this idea of the creation loop. It is a way to create without burnout. I think we are often living in a burnout loop where we are gathering a lot of information and then we’re outputting, like input, output, input, output. The world tends to poo poo this idea of taking time to think about things, or of taking time to rest and renew, or of even celebrating and reflecting and acknowledging what we just achieved. You know, it’s like, no onto the next thing.
But when I look back over my life, I realized that when I was burning out, I was just doing this burnout loop. And there were some pieces missing. When I had those pieces in place, like taking five years out to travel. But there have been many other times that I’ve taken rest periods. I realized that’s when I was most sustainable. That’s when I was at my most optimal in terms of my creative output. And creative output doesn’t have to be painting and singing and dancing creative output. We are all creative beings. We are all creators. We create a life. We create our families, we create relationships, we create businesses, we create products, we create services.
And so the creation loop adds a couple of extra things to this idea of just input output. So it begins with this idea of the input, and I call that saturate. But once we receive that information, that tendency to rush to output is something we want to just pause on for a moment and add one more step. And that step is percolate. And percolating is just like when we let coffee percolate. It’s letting our ideas brew. It’s letting ourselves make abstract connections.
Our society has phrases for this. I’m going to put that on the back burner. I’m going to let me sleep on it. These are all ideas for this concept of percolate. So we saturate, we percolate, and then we move into create, bringing the thing into being. And then as we create, we need to let that go. We need to abandon it at some point. We used to say that in the film industry, no film is ever finished. It’s simply abandoned because you can keep editing a film forever. You can keep writing a book forever. You can keep editing an email forever. At some point, we have to let that out in the world.
Once that’s released into the world, we don’t go back to input and starting again. We celebrate. We move on to this next part of the creation loop. Celebrate. And that’s acknowledgement. Acknowledgement of self, acknowledgement of others who’ve helped us along the way. And we do this whether the thing we created turned out exactly as we wanted or not. We want to release the chemicals and the hormones that have us say, that was worth doing. Let me do it again. And so we’re building this creation strength, this creation aptitude, when we celebrate what we create. And we’re still not going to rush back to input to the saturate phase.
There’s one more missing piece, and that is to rejuvenate. And inside of rejuvenation is this idea of renewal, of reinvention, of rest. And rest doesn’t have to just mean sleeping for 24 hours straight. For some people, rest is getting out and going partying or to go and take a trip or whatever it is. And so these are the things that are often missing. We’re really good at the burnout loop. We’ve been taught the burnout loop. School teaches us the burnout loop. Work teaches us the burnout loop. Saturate, create, saturate, create. But for many people, when I speak to them, one or maybe all three of these other parts are missing.
So we saturate, then we percolate. We give space to let what we’ve inputted marinade, to evolve inside our own awareness. And then we create. And then once we’ve created, we celebrate, then we rejuvenate, and then we run that cycle again. And we can run that cycle in a minute, really quickly. We can run it in a day. We can run it over the course of a year.
When I think about what making it means to me, I think society gives us lots of pictures of what making it looks like. Fancy cars and houses and trips. That’s all great, but that’s not really what making it is. For me personally, making it is something that happened this week actually was a moment when I realized, oh, this is it. This is what my life has culminated in. This is what’s important. This is the wealth.
So let me tell you a story about what happened to me on Tuesday of this week. My nephew’s been living in France for a long time. He’s married this gorgeous girl. They’ve had a beautiful little baby. It’s summertime here in Australia. I can finish work early because I run my own business. I can choose the time that I spend on things. My whole family is here. My daughter’s up visiting from university. The music goes on the deck. We’re swimming in the pool. My kids make Mexican food. It’s all of us sitting around the table laughing. It’s this little baby figuring out, you don’t take mouthfuls of water when you get into the pool.
And it’s all of us just sharing time together, being present with each other and celebrating the bonds that we have. You can do that wherever you are. It doesn’t have to be in a fancy situation. There have been times in my life where I’ve had absolutely nothing, but I felt that wealth, I felt that connection, I felt that richness. So for me, making it is so much more relational. It’s so much more about the people in my life, the contributions that I’ve made, the standing that I am in with other people. And I don’t mean that in terms of, oh, I need everybody to think I’m great. But what am I doing? What’s my part that I’m doing to bring to these relationships? When am I neglecting my relationships? When am I really living up to my ideals for a relationship?
The part that I bring to the relationship that, to me, is probably the biggest thing about making it. It’s really tricky because we can pursue all sorts of evidence of making it. The big house, the big team, vanity metrics, and we’re actually jeopardizing our relationships or we’re jeopardizing our health. I’ve been around a while now, and I feel like it comes down to relationships. It comes down to living our values. It comes down to looking after our own health and the health of others, the people in our immediate families, but also in our communities and in a broader sense, globally thinking that way as well. Making it is rarely, if ever, a straight line. You know, sometimes the things we think are detours or sidetracks are the main thing. They’re the things that really will make the biggest difference.
For many years, I worked in documentary films, and then we had an agency. Then what happened was we took five years off. Five years. And I was young, like I’d come straight out of school. I got into working really hard. And when I was about 25, my husband and I bought an old Viscount Royale 1970s caravan and a fantastic old Toyota troop carrier. We traveled around Australia, and it was incredible. Back then, it was just the wide open road. There was hardly anybody out there. And we would go weeks in the desert or in these amazing coastal landscapes or rainforest landscapes, really seeing very few people.
And it was this sense that there was all this spaciousness. There was this whole other world happening out in the desert right now while everybody else was buzzing around in a city. And it just gives you a perspective, it gives you a sense of space. We read lots of great books at that time, influential books on my life, and we came back quite different. We came back, I think, expanded. I felt being out there in the desert, especially the Australian desert, is so vast and so absent of people and buildings, and you’re just you and nature and the bigness of things. I said, mom, I feel like the desert’s changed me forever. And I feel that even now, and that was 25 years ago that I came back.
But I came back with different eyes. I came back with this perspective that I think really helps as well, and a new sense of who I was, what I wanted and what I needed. I think we need to give ourselves these times and these spaces. A lot of people thought it was impractical. You know, my from 25 to 30 they can be very profitable years in someone’s life. That might be when you should be making it right? I was out in the desert in a caravan, living very modestly, but I had some of the best times of my life. We climbed mountains, we flew into remote places and hiked out for 10 days with nothing but what was on our backs.
We danced on salt plains in the middle of lake air with not another human being in sight. These are life experiences that make us richer. And whatever that that looks like for anybody that’s listening, don’t let somebody else tell you this isn’t the right time or that’s not practical, or you’re going to waste this moment. Oftentimes the side roads turn out to be the main roads in our lives.
I’m Michelle Falzon and you’ve been listening to Making It. You can find me at michellefalzon.com. That’s Michelle F A L Z O N dot com. You’ll find the link in the show notes and I have a resource for the Create Without Burnout framework, and you can find that at createwithoutburnout.com.
Danny Iny: Making it is part of the Mirasee FM podcast network, which also includes such shows as To Lead Is Human and the Neuroscience of Coaching. To catch the great episodes that are coming up on Making it, please follow us on Mirasee FM’s YouTube channel or your favorite podcast player. And if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a comment or a starred review. It’s the best way to help us get these ideas to more people. Thank you and we’ll see you next time.