day4-burnout-breakthrough — *Burnout Day 4 - 12 Days of Burnout Breakthrough*

Burnout often feels like an overwhelming fog—your mind races, your motivation plummets, and everything seems harder than it should be.

But what if the solution to burnout is not about doing more, but instead about getting clear? In Day 4 of the 12 Days of Holiday Burnout Breakthrough, hypnotherapist and NLP trainer Pam Butler shared her transformative insights on finding clarity, focusing on strengths, and using tools like tarot card readings to reset and recharge.

Let’s unpack her wisdom and discover how clarity and self-awareness can help you conquer burnout. Blog post continued below…..

Featured

Top 10 signs of toxic workplace culture and how to fix it with corporate wellness programs

unique charateristics of burnout — *Burnout is Unique*

What Makes Burnout Unique?

Burnout isn’t just stress or fatigue—it’s deeper and more pervasive. Pam describes it as a state of exhaustion that often includes:

Loss of empathy.
Disconnection from purpose.
Lack of interest or motivation, even in activities you once enjoyed.

She explained burnout as a state where "your synapses feel burnt," vividly illustrating how overwhelming and debilitating it can be.

The Root of Burnout: A Lack of Clarity

Pam emphasizes that burnout often stems from a lack of clarity in various aspects of life:

Clarity of Purpose: Why are you doing what you’re doing?
Clarity of Needs: Are you setting boundaries and communicating what you need?
Clarity of Direction: Do you know where you want to go, or are you only focused on avoiding where you don’t want to be?

Without clarity, it’s easy to feel stuck, overwhelmed, and lost. This fog leads to burnout, making it hard to find your way back to motivation and joy.

Quick Wins to Break Through Burnout

Focus on Strengths, Not Weaknesses
When burnout sets in, it’s natural to dwell on what’s going wrong or where you’re falling short. But this only deepens the spiral. Pam suggests shifting the focus to your strengths. What do you enjoy? What are you good at? These are the keys to reigniting your energy and purpose.
Pro Tip: Tools like tarot card readings or coaching sessions can help identify strengths you may have forgotten, offering a refreshing perspective.
Find What You Enjoy
Burnout often comes from losing touch with activities that bring joy. Rediscover hobbies, passions, or small daily rituals that make you happy. This helps balance out the mental and emotional drain of stress.
Set Boundaries
Clear boundaries protect your time and energy. They also help you focus on what truly matters, reducing the overwhelm that leads to burnout.
Visualize Where You Want to Go
It’s not enough to know what you want to avoid; you need a clear picture of where you’re heading. Pam notes that your brain works best when you have a specific goal to aim for—not just a vague sense of what you don’t want.

Using Tarot Cards for Clarity and Strengths

Pam uses tarot cards in a unique way—as a tool to uncover strengths, limiting beliefs, and opportunities for growth. Tarot taps into archetypes, which are universal symbols we all understand, to help clarify what’s holding you back and how you can move forward.

For those who are skeptical, Pam explains that tarot is less about mysticism and more about reflection. It’s a way to visualize and reconnect with your inner strengths—something we all need when burnout clouds our judgment.

Why Strengths and Clarity Matter in the Workplace

In corporate environments, burnout can spread quickly. Managers often struggle to recognize individual strengths or align team members with roles that energize them. Pam highlights the importance of:

Identifying and leveraging employees’ strengths.
Partnering team members with complementary skills to enhance collaboration.
Creating clear, purpose-driven goals to keep everyone motivated.

By fostering clarity and playing to strengths, organizations can prevent burnout and build more engaged, resilient teams.

Your Burnout Prevention Prescription

If you’re feeling the weight of burnout, here’s how to get started on the path to clarity and renewal:

Reflect on Your Strengths: What are you naturally good at? What energizes you?
Rediscover Joy: What hobbies or activities make you feel alive?
Set Boundaries: Protect your time and energy to focus on what truly matters.
Visualize Your Goals: Focus on where you want to go, not just what you want to avoid.

Connect with Pam Butler

Pam Butler is a hypnotherapist, NLP trainer, and tarot card reader who helps individuals and teams find clarity, reset their mindset, and leverage their strengths to thrive. She offers services like Lunch and Learn tarot sessions, clarity kickstarts, and programming evaluations to create more productive and balanced workplaces.

Visit her at PamButlerHypnotherapy.com to learn more about her offerings and explore how she can help you or your team prevent burnout.

Key Takeaway

Burnout clouds your vision and disconnects you from your strengths. But by finding clarity, focusing on what you do well, and setting clear goals, you can break through the fog and rediscover your purpose and energy.

Let’s make clarity our superpower this holiday season. Share this post with someone who needs a reset, and stay tuned for the next episode in the 12 Days of Holiday Burnout Breakthrough!

About the Author:

Kathie Owen is a seasoned corporate wellness consultant, life coach, and former fitness and wellness director with over two decades of experience in creating healthier, happier workplaces. With a psychology degree from the University of Houston and a passion for motivation, Kathie has dedicated her career to ending toxic workplace cultures through holistic wellness programs that truly make a difference.

*Kathie Owen,* *Corporate Wellness Consultant since 2012 (Our Story*)

Having worked in both corporate and fitness environments, Kathie blends her expertise in employee engagement, leadership development, physical health, and mental well-being to design programs that prevent burnout and inspire thriving teams.

She’s been a certified fitness trainer since 2002 and has personally coached hundreds of individuals to reach their wellness goals. Now, she’s on a mission to share her strategies with companies that value their people.

Through her 12 Days of Burnout Breakthrough series, Kathie combines personal stories, expert insights, and practical tips to help you recognize, prevent, and heal from burnout. Her goal? To show you how a little bit of wellness can transform not only your workplace but also your life.

When she’s not leading workshops, coaching aspiring wellness professionals, or writing her next blog post, you’ll find Kathie walking her dog Rusty, diving into her favorite self-development books, or dreaming up her next big idea to inspire and uplift others.

Follow Kathie on Social Media

Transcript

Kathie Owen: 0:00

Hello. Hello. And welcome back to the 12 Days of Holiday Burnout. Today I bring on another special guest. One of my friends, her name is Pam Butler. And As you've noticed everybody has different words for burnout and different ways of dealing with it. So today we're going to have Pam give us a little tidbit of how she coaches with dealing with burnout and things that we can learn and have a quick win today. But before we get started, I'm going to let Pam introduce herself to you and tell you a little bit about what she does. Hey, Kathie

Pam Butler: 0:38

thank you. It's so great to be here. And what a lovely invitation. And what an important thing to be talking about. So, um, so thank you for leading the call on the burnout aspect. So yeah, I'm Pam Butler. I'm a hypnotherapist and I'm also a hypnotherapy trainer and an NLP trainer. I've spent a long time coaching. I've been coaching for over 25 years using various techniques and methodologies and approaches. And mostly I work with entrepreneurial women who are starting their own businesses or working in their own businesses. Many of them are solopreneurs. But in a past life, I actually worked in corporate and I worked in an agency, but I also worked with corporate, with not for profit, organizations in an, Place in Toronto called the Center for Social Innovation, where there were a lot of not for profit, people who were running businesses, but they didn't dream of running businesses, they dreamed of their vision and their vision having the impact. And so their ability to manage and their understanding of what employees needed and how to move it forward and keep their people happy and productive and contributing and all of those pieces was really important. And so I would come in as a communications trainer. I had a variety of processes that I would bring them through, and that's the bulk of my experience with burnout is in that kind of an environment as well as, of course, with solo entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs who are always trying to go for the next thing and often working real hard at it, but not always going in the direction that they wanted to go. Yeah. So that's, that's

Kathie Owen: 2:33

a little bit about

Pam Butler: 2:34

me.

Kathie Owen: 2:35

Awesome. Thank you so much. A great segue. So as you see, she's got all these different little pieces of expertise in dealing with corporate wellness in general. And all of us in general have to deal with burnout. We call it different things. It can be anxiety, it can be overwhelm, procrastination, things like that. So, um, I'm going to set the stage for Pam to kind of talk about what she calls burnout and then go into simple solutions to help deal with burnout. And again, we'll have her back on the podcast and. In the future, so we can dig a little bit deeper, but today I just want to hear a little bit about a quick win we can take home with us today to break through that burnout. I'll give it to you, Pam.

Pam Butler: 3:30

Perfect, Kathie and, and burnout is distinctive because It, it is burned out. You're not just fatigued. You're not just anxious. You're not just frustrated. There is an element of burnout. Many years ago, just seems like an aside, but also going back, I was at a, uh, an event and I had took melatonin, actually, which is a supplement that causes you to relax and causes your body to relax. And I took too much of it. And I went to this event. I took it the night before, cause I was having trouble sleeping. And there was a lot of friction at this event. It was really a toxic environment and it was, it was a rough, rough. And by the end of the day, I literally felt like my synapses were burnt. Like I felt burnt out and so it is a real thing. Like, burnout is a real reference and people, they lose sleep. There's, you know, there's, there's a lot of pieces that, you know, are symptomatic of many things, but distinctive about burnout is a loss of empathy. It's a loss of connection. It's a loss of interest and motivation in people who would not normally present that. And so that's kind of the burnout piece where you know you're not just dealing with stress, you're not just dealing with a rough road, you're not just dealing with some sort of, stress is a normal up and down, but you're dealing with something that's even more kind of significant. And in my experience, that always, that, that fatigue, that exhaustion. That lack of connection, that sort of withdraw that is, is not productive generally comes from a lack of clarity. That's really the source of it for people that they're not clear about where they want to go. They're not necessarily clear about what they're doing. They're not being clear about what they need. They're not setting their boundaries. So those pieces, those communication pieces, contribute to it, as does just the general perception of self that's easy to lose as you start to sink under that burden of burning out, if you know what I mean. So, I don't know if that answered your question, but yeah, that's kind of my position on burnout.

Kathie Owen: 6:19

Absolutely. I love that. And because I, I really want to hone in on this, it's lack of clarity, lack of clarity of our purpose, lack of clarity of why we're doing what we're doing because we're in such a fog. I love how she said her synapses felt burnt. They just felt burnt. And that is a great description of it. And when you feel that, that's what burnout feels like. It's just burnt everything. You don't have any clarity on why you're doing what you're doing and you're just overwhelmed. There's no boundaries. I love how she mentioned boundaries because that's really, really important. I want to touch on one thing and that is, um, one thing that Pam does is tarot card readings which helps us identify our clarity. And so this could be really beneficial for somebody inside of burnout and working with Pam and understanding your tarot card readings. As mystic as that may sound, I really want to touch on this because she said there was no clarity. So let's go back to that and let's talk about how we can find clarity with our tarot card readings. I want to hear about this.

Pam Butler: 7:36

100%. Thank you very much. As you know, I love tarot and I feel it is, I realize it sounds incredibly woo to people and it is woo. One of the things that tarot really captures well is archetypes. That it's all talking about archetypical, um, information and that it's easy to grasp. When you think that there is an archetype of mother, right? There is an archetype of maiden. There is an archetype. And they're not stereotypes, they're archetypes. We all can kind of agree with certain aspects of it. The way that I use the tarot cards is to help people identify their strength. So I don't predict with tarot. I don't. I feel like that's, I don't think it's karmically a good idea. I don't think it's energetically a good idea. And, and it's not how I use them. I use them archetypically to indicate to people what they're working with. Sort of, perhaps limiting ideas that they have about what they're working with. And then personal strengths that they can bring to bear on the circumstance. That will bring them through to a successful completion or will improve the results that they're getting or direct them, um, in how to move forward with what it is that they would like to accomplish. And it's really important for burnout because it's easy to lose track of your strengths, and especially in the workplace, especially in a corporate world. And especially now, I mean, you know, when you think about it, I was thinking about AI the other day. And how Businesses and employees are, it's getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So not only are there fewer people for you to actually be involving yourself with, fewer conversations to be had, fewer of, you know, inspiration of ideas from people other than yourself, that tool is getting smaller, but also there's the pressure of doing actually more work and doing work that other people used to do. So that's a real issue. I think in, in corporate now with burnout. And so when people don't understand their own strength and work to their strengths and over focus on their weaknesses, which it's easy to happen. If you're kind of, you feel like you're losing ground or you feel like you're not being enough, or you're not doing enough, or it's not working out or all of those things. You know, ruminatory conversations that can really run us off the rails. When you fall into that, it's hard to keep track of your strengths. And for many managers even, they don't necessarily have tools where they can evaluate people's strengths and play to people's strengths so that people are, they know what they are, they can assign them accordingly. Or, partner people who have complimentary strengths so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. So, so that and clarity. About that is actually sort of prescription that I would give people to really bring their attention to what they do well, you know, everybody's done probably these personal development exercises where it says, what are your strengths? What do you do? Well, what do you what do you unique about? What are your gifts? That's really true and important. That in combination with knowing where you want to go and not just where you don't want to go because that's not a productive way to move forward. Your brain is Going to, it's like saying don't think of a pink elephant. Well, good luck. Now that I've said that, you must think of a pink elephant, even in order not to think of it, right? So declare, it's important to know where you don't want to go, because that gives you the contrast, but you must identify. You do want to go, and if you do that and you identify the strengths that you can rely on, that can take you there, that can lead you there. Not just your strengths, but also things that you like to do, then it really smooths the way for for an easier process.

Kathie Owen: 12:10

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Here is the one thing I really want to hone in on, I want to focus in on. What she said is we focus when we're in burnout, when we're under stress, we focus on our weaknesses. And it's hard to not think of that pink elephant weakness that we've got going on because that's the way our brains are wired. So we want to focus on Strengths. And that's where the card reading can come in and you can see, oh, I forgot I had that strength. Another thing that she said that, that's really helpful when it comes to burnout is we've, we want to find what we like to do, what we enjoy to do. Hobbies are a great way to counterbalance your burnout. And when you find out what you like, what your strengths are, and you work on those. It kind of puts that pink elephant in way, way far away in the zoo where it belongs. That's exactly. Wait a second. In the circus

Pam Butler: 13:21

where it belongs. The circus where it belongs. That's even better and even truer actually. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. All right.

Kathie Owen: 13:30

All right. This was really, really great. Really helpful. I hope you got a quick win today. Before we end, I always say this, I include a blog post that includes all of the links and actually bonus resources in this blog post. So you'll be able to find Pam, and find bonus resources. Maybe you want to work with her. She does these Lunch and Learns that are Tarot card readings that help you identify your strengths inside your program, inside your business. What phenomenal way to really build on this and help prevent that burnout. So Pam, tell us where we can find you and we'll

Pam Butler: 14:16

close out. Perfect. Thanks so much for the chance. I'm at pambutlerhypnotherapy. com, pambutlerhypnotherapy. com. You'll find all of my offerings on there. I do do hypnotherapy. I'm a hypno coach. I do tarot reading. I do something called a quick, clear mindset. reset that is very quick if you just have a singular problem that you want to deal with. So it's, it's like they always say, you know, the best defense is a good offense. And so prevention is a great way to intervene and keep things kind of moving in the right direction. I do clarity kickstarts with people and I do do programming evaluations so that people can understand this is what I did with the, um, with the not for profits. is showing behaviors along an entire spectrum. Not that either end is good or bad. It just creates so much more understanding all the way around and so much more empathy and connection. So you can find all of that kind of information on pam. wisconsintherapy. com.

Kathie Owen: 15:24

Okay, great. I hope you got a quick win today. I know I sure did. That clarity is, is king when it comes to dealing with burnout and finding your strengths, your purpose, your reasons why you're doing things, and also to balance life out. All right, so that's today's episode. in the 12 Days of Burnout Breakthrough. And, um, I will see you on the next episode. I trust that you found it helpful. Again, the links to all of this, including bonus and other episodes as well, will be in the show notes and description below. And until next time, I will see you next time. Peace out and Namaste.