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The Freedom Formula

30 October, 2024 · Erin Stafford

Burnout and sustainable peak performance expert Erin Stafford reveals a fail-proof framework to break free from burnout and super charge your life, leaders, and teams. Reach peak performance without sacrificing well-being.

As leaders, we’re familiar with burnout, both in ourselves and our teams. It’s the invisible, yet inevitable, side effect of ambition, deadlines, and a culture that celebrates working harder. But here’s the truth: peak performance shouldn’t come at the expense of well-being.

The Freedom Formula is a research-backed framework that empowers leaders to break free from burnout, optimize energy, and create resilient teams in four simple steps.

1. Recognize Your Warning Signs

Burnout doesn’t announce itself. Instead, it seeps into our lives with early warning signs—irritability, chronic fatigue, a lingering sense of dread. Ignoring these signals is like driving with the “check engine” light on; eventually, it catches up to you. As a leader, recognizing burnout signals is crucial—not just for yourself, but for your team. Spotting these signs early gives you the opportunity to adjust before burnout escalates.

By promoting awareness of burnout’s warning signs and how they can show up differently in everyone, you build a culture that values proactive self-care and resilience over silent endurance. When individuals are encouraged to understand and respond to their bodies’ cues, productivity and engagement increase.

2. Reframe the Challenge

Leaders are problem solvers by nature, but too often, high-achievers see challenges with their energy and productivity as barriers to success. They try to outwork burnout because they’ve been told if they work hard, they win, and if they don’t win it’s because they haven’t worked hard enough. But this line of thinking is a slippery slope to burnout.

Reframing isn’t about sugarcoating reality; it’s about rewiring the way we respond to these obstacles so that we view them as a path to growth and an opportunity to make some positive changes in how we live our lives. It’s a moment to say “Wait, what I’ve been doing isn’t working.”

By reframing energy and productivity challenges, leaders model a crucial mindset for their teams—one that sees problems as opportunities to learn, pivot, evolve, and ultimately be happier and healthier.

3. Realign Your Energy

Forget time management—energy management is where true productivity lies. Leaders often pride themselves on “making the most” of their time, but that approach is a fast track to burnout if it’s not aligned with your energy.

That’s why it’s important to understand your natural productivity rhythms, prioritizing high-value tasks during peak energy times, and knowing when to delegate or pause. By doing this, you create a foundation where both you and your team can perform at optimal levels without constantly running on empty.

Teams that operate within an energy-aligned framework experience less stress and produce higher-quality work. In turn, organizations benefit from increased job satisfaction, and a healthier, more sustainable approach to high performance.

4. Repeat

The journey to burnout-proof success isn’t a one-time thing; it’s a continuous cycle of recognizing, reframing, and realigning. Life will always throw curveballs when you least expect it—leaders who embrace these four steps as an ongoing practice develop resilience that can withstand whatever challenges come their way.

Create Freedom Today

Today’s business landscape demands more than ever. We need to drive performance, navigate change, and inspire teams in a way that doesn’t sacrifice well-being for results. By embracing The Freedom Formula, leaders can create a fail-proof foundation for sustainable success that empowers individuals to work at their best without burning out. Teams who understand and live by these principles are ultimately more engaged, healthier, and happier both personally and professionally. Isn’t that what we all want? 

Erin Stafford

Having worked with some of the world’s biggest brands, including Coca-Cola, American Express, Apple, and MTV, and having surveyed and interviewed thousands of the world’s highest achievers, Erin Stafford has cracked the burnout code. She is a burnout survivor herself as well as a hyper-growth business leader, author, and social psychologist. She draws from her distinct international career to share impactful, research-backed mindset shifts to help leaders and teams go from burnout and bust to sustainable peak performance. Audiences leave her high-energy keynotes revitalized and with a renewed sense of excitement and engagement for both their work and their lives.