Step back for the breakthrough

You gotta see it in person. (Monet, La Gare Saint-Lazare, le train de Normandie)

Back when I used to have appointments six days a week, I cherished any time when I could do my actual work.

Teaching music lessons was the fun part, but there was so much administrative stuff that needed to be done, and keeping up was a huge challenge.

I was sinking into a life that had no time for reflection or course correction — I was always running and striving.

After a couple of years, the stress caught up with me. I didn’t have much of a life, and I was exhausted all the time. Worst of all, I didn’t even realize it, because I actually did enjoy my work. It’s just that I had nothing else.

Because the only tool in my toolkit was “try harder,” the first step toward changing my life was failure. I stopped enjoying the lessons I was teaching, even with students I loved, and found myself looking forward to solitary activities like bookkeeping. I was burned out.

I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I felt really awful about not being able to serve my students well, because my entire identity was wrapped up in my ability to do so. But I just couldn’t push any more.

I took a little time — about eighteen months — to try different stuff. I hired an employee, and then another. I started writing more. I did some group classes and summer camps. I cut my teaching schedule drastically. I tried not to panic when money was tight.

My music school finally had room to grow now that I could lead it. And eventually, I came up with a new idea and started The Little Middle School. This, of course, led to another cycle of working a lot, but I had a new passion to follow. When I started to get tired, I knew what to do: I hired help and took some things off of my plate.

I’ve learned that, like a balloon, my capacity expands based on the space that I allow. And also, like a balloon, I cannot take on more than my capacity or else I’ll fall apart.

By 2016, I was able to take on more work than I had ever thought possible. This came directly from taking time off to spend time with friends and family and travel. My next step was to find even more help: More employees and more mentorship. And by 2018, I was able to add hobbies back into my life.

There have been many moments along the way where I was frustrated that changes weren’t happening fast enough. For instance, I would be working on a Saturday morning and think to myself, “I’ve set aside the entire day for this project. Why am I not getting anywhere?” I had to learn to put away the work and go do something fun instead. Lo and behold, I would receive the breakthrough I was looking for when I returned to work on Monday. Or maybe it would be Thursday, or the Monday after. I could count on it. Knowing that the breakthrough would eventually show up, I learned to recognize the signs that I had worked enough. I was able to skip the anxiety and frustration of not getting anywhere and go straight to the fun activity.

Many of my students and employees struggle with this balance. Some of them fear the hard work or aren’t accustomed to it, so they only do the fun stuff. The more dangerous group tries to push through fatigue, frustration, and overwhelm. That’s not where the breakthrough lives, yet this dynamic is hard to talk about because these people are all too ready to call themselves lazy and ineffective (believing that they belong to the first group). They have a hard time accepting that the key to resolving their challenge is to back off and do something else for awhile — that the solution to their problem is to do the opposite of what they have been doing, rather than more of the same.

How do you know whether stepping back will lead to your breakthrough? Try it. Whether it’s an afternoon spent with friends or pursuing a hobby, a week away, or a semester’s sabbatical, you’re bound to find something. It’s especially good if you have a mentor to guide you through the process.

When you return to that thorny math problem, relationship difficulty, or career decision, your path forward is likely to be more evident. Like a Monet painting, sometimes we can see more clearly when we step back and get a little distance from our subject. Also much like a Monet painting, the execution of your solution isn’t necessarily going to be simple or easy, but it will take you somewhere new. That’s the best antidote to burnout that there is.