Creativity, burnout, and the asset

Is your brain still working two years into the pandemic?

Welcome. I’m Katherine Raz. I own a shop in Tacoma, Washington called The Fernseed and this is my newsletter about running an independent retail business in the age of Amazon, Covid, etc. If you’re a shop owner, or you sell products to small retail businesses, or you’re just curious what this whole business is about, you’re in the right place. (And if this email was forwarded to you, you can sign up to receive it yourself right here. It’s free!)

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Getting creative mid-pandemic: professional photos of our plant-at-home kits! Photos: Tori Dickson photography

I was listening to a recent episode of Wisdom from the Top, a podcast about leadership hosted by Guy Raz (nope, we're not related), with guest Margaret Heffernan, an executive leadership coach and author.

Raz asked Heffernan about the differences between companies that survived the early days of the pandemic and those that didn't, and Heffernan's response really struck me. While a lot of lip service has been paid to companies that pivoted quickly and made smart changes to their products or services, the real marker of business survival, she said, was how much debt a business was carrying in early 2020. Those that had stayed conservative pre-pandemic and had not accrued much debt had money to fall back on, while many companies with debt on the books filed for bankruptcy.

I think Fernseed had about $30k in savings going into the pandemic and around $18k in credit card debt, so we were okay, but we'd only been in business 11 months. Pivoting quickly and finding change in the couch cushions is a personal strength of mine, so Fernseed got a lot of recognition for being "one of those scrappy businesses" that figured out a formula to get us through the lean months when our shop was closed. We made plant-at-home terrarium kits, hosted live streams, and started offering delivery. Aside from the financial stress of it all, I kind of enjoyed the opportunity to be creative in the face of uncertainty and be recognized for it.

Two years in, it's a different story.

I had a meeting at our community bank earlier this week, trying to figure out options for debt restructuring. (It's fiiiine, we just have some high-interest debt I'm trying to move to a lower interest pay-back option. ) I ended up talking with our banker about how those scrappy, early pandemic-era businesses are faring now. She wondered: now that they're no longer making hand sanitizer instead of distilling vodka, are those businesses that were so creative in the early days of the pandemic still thriving? Is Fernseed?

Uh, yes and no. It's been weird.

Making pivots to our sales channels and processes was easy for me in the beginning because I still had fuel in my personal tank. Yes, things were frightening, but they weren't frightening AND ongoing... yet. I've often compared running this business during COVID to being on a treadmill I can't get off, but it's more like completing a 10k race only to be told at the finish line that this is actually an Iron Man, and you'd better keep going.

Me in the pandemic early days: still running on adrenaline.

Trying to stay one step ahead of trends to stay viable is way harder now because my brain is tired. It's easy to be creative and flexible when you're at the top of Maslow's pyramid, but after two years of pandemic stress, I'm back at the "seeking safety" level while my business requires me to be at self-actualization to attain the creative focus I require to keep going back to the whiteboard to brainstorm ways to stay visible to "today's consumer" — who is way different from "two weeks ago's consumer" due to rising gas prices, etc. Trying to figure out where the economy is going and how our sales will be affected has been a struggle, but it's a challenge I'm up for if I can find the brain space to actually stay creative and focused. I can't do that if my body and mind are running on the reserve tank.

Me, 20 months in to pandemic business survival mode, a little tired.

Unfortunately my brain seems to have a permanent overdrive feature telling me that the only way to relieve stress is to power through it. But I got to a place last week where that feature started sputtering out. My limbs felt like lead, and my brain was in a fog. The simplest tasks, like answering an email, felt Herculean. I couldn't take a day off, though, because due to a recent staffing issue, I'm actually working twelve days in a row right now.

But I've been at peak burnout before and I remember the advice of my therapist, which was this: check in with your body. How's your posture? Are you hungry? Have you taken a deep breath recently? Start there. Take five minutes. Roll your shoulders, eat a banana. Breathe.

Next, drop the "shoulds." I should meditate. I should go for a run. I should read for pleasure. I should make a gratitude list. I should carve out time for a yoga class. I should garden. I should get back into the habit of making healthy smoothies. I know these things will help me! I should do them.

NOPE, my therapist says. You checked in with your body, now check in with your brain. What do you actually want to do right now?

I want to take a hot shower, and sit on the bathroom floor playing Wordle. I want to write in my journal about how angry I am. I want to watch The Dropout on Hulu in bed before sleep even though blue light is bad for me. I want to scream-sing Nirvana's "In Bloom" and then go down an internet rabbit hole trying to answer the question of how singers scream-sing on tour and maintain their vocal health — THAT is what my brain is telling me to do right now. Not yoga.

So that, my friends, is what I did last week. And you know what? It helped. I watched Elizabeth Holmes fall apart on a TV show and ate cookies in bed, and scream-sang in my car, and by day three I actually felt like I had a shred of creative capacity returning.

Greg McKeown coined the phrase "protecting the asset" in his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. Protecting the asset (the asset is you) is another way of saying "preventing burnout," and McKeown focuses on sleep as the key tool, but I would argue that we know ourselves best. What prevents burnout for me may not work for you. Sleep and water are important, but I think reconnecting with your creative capacity while you're in burnout mode requires a more robust suite of tools.

Here are some other ideas I have found that help me protect the asset and stay creatively flexible:

• Carving out at least one day a month (or every week if I can get it) where I schedule nothing, so I can use this day to do whatever strikes me as useful or rewarding in the moment. I remember a scene in Mad Men where someone asked Don Draper how he came up with such powerful ad campaign ideas. His answer was something like, "I think about it all day... and then I go to the movies." We have to allow ourselves time to stop problem solving, but for productivity-driven people like me, this is hard. But science supports it! Downtime encourages creativity. Knowing this makes it easier for me to build unproductive time into my regular schedule.

• Keeping a notebook with me at all times where I can write down creative ideas as they occur to me, without having to put them into action right away. This practice—"capturing"—actually comes from David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, and really, really helps in getting things out of your brain so you can maintain a relaxed state of mind.

• Twyla Tharp coined a term called "scratching" in her (amazing) book The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life. Tharp writes, "Scratching is what you do when you can't wait for the thunderbolt to hit you." It's about searching for scraps of inspiration in places that feel intuitive. In Tharp's examples these places can be thrift stores, cities, rock quarries, cookbooks — whatever. I like to scratch by visiting open air markets, used bookstores, estate sales, and party supply stores.

• Asking for help keeps me out of siloed thinking. I have a tendency to believe I should probably have all the answers, and if I don't, it's a personal failing. I mentioned that I was recently looking for ways to restructure our debt so that repayment doesn't cripple our cashflow (topic of a later post, I promise). So of course I attempted to do that by looking at spreadsheets for 45 minutes, then scream-singing in my car and crying on the bathroom floor — very productive. A day later, however, I decided a better approach would be to email the city of Tacoma's business financing program manager and to contact our community bank and just say, "Here's what I'm dealing with. Can you help me?" A day after that they had both gotten back to me with a list of options I never would have considered, all of them extremely helpful, and getting that help freed up my brain capacity to think about other things for once.

• A friend of mine recently connected with a life coach (I hear your eye roll, and look: she knows, I know — but woah, it was helpful) who offered her the idea that you can only do two things every day. Many of us are tethered to our ever-lengthening to-do lists, but the problem with to-do lists is they present us with tasks that don't provide satisfaction once they're accomplished, especially because most of us don't cross everything off our list each day. (If you're like me, you carry over 30-60% of it.) Look, I love a to-do list (my favorite is an app called TeuxDeux, it will change your life), but it takes over my brain space rather than freeing it up. The "do two things" idea means focusing only on a pair of tasks that will provide a sense of accomplishment, and being realistic that, with everything else going on, we're lucky if we can knock those out. I've been trying recently to identify what those two things are for me each day, and if I can actually do them, it's like I've given myself permission to relax afterward. That relaxation frees up brain space for creative thought again.

These are mostly creative ideas, but there’s are a wealth of information online about how to take care of yourself physically and mentally when dealing with unrelenting burnout. As a parent, I know that caregivers deal with this constantly, so I searched for information about caregiver stress to mine for more tips, and wow. There’s a real goldmine of wisdom about handling caregiver burnout that’s helpful to business owners as well.

My favorite tip came from this article, which said:

Focus on what you are able to provide. It's normal to feel guilty sometimes, but understand that no one is a "perfect" caregiver. Believe that you are doing the best you can and making the best decisions you can at any given time.

Doing my best! And so are you.

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