How to avoid founder burnout with Nina Nesdoly, Founder of Workplace Clarity

How To Start Up by FF&M

In this episode, we hear from Nina Nesdoly, founder of Workplace Clarity. As a workplace stress and burnout prevention consultant, Nina draws on her management and neuroscience background to deliver workshops and training courses to help her clients overcome workplace stress, prevent burnout and improve their workplace performance.

Nina shares her advice on maintaining a work/life balance, identifying stress triggers and techniques for relieving stress.

Nina's advice:

• Burnout happens when demands exceed resources; build your own resources by outsourcing the things you’re less good at to experts, thus reducing the demands on yourself
• Set realistic expectations and don’t set goals for yourself that depend on you being superhuman or neglecting rest
• Schedule in buffer time (to give yourself a break if you are unwell) and have an emergency budget (to give yourself a break if there’s a crisis)
• Three stress triggers are:
  • Feeling overwhelmed
  • Dealing with unpredictable/unfamiliar situations
  • Social evaluative threats
• Look for the positives: turn threats into something you can be excited about, and move away from the negative thoughts to focus consciously on what makes you happy
• When establishing work-life balance, set boundaries between the two. Try blocking notifications when not working
• When seeking to de-stress, remember social connections and community can be supportive; ‘social buffering’ is when oxytocin (produced by social interaction) helps fight stress
• As a sole founder you have no-one to moderate you, so check in on yourself.
• Remember your own brain is your harshest critic.
• To summarise, the six causes of burnout are:
  • workload
  • lack of community
  • lack of control
  • mismatch of values (if you are working for a company whose ideals you don’t share)
  • a sense of unfairness in the processes operating around you
  • absence of reward

If you’d like to contact Nina, you can reach her at [e-mail]

Head over to Speakpipe to leave your voice note for our future guests.
Let us know how your start up journey is going or if you have any questions you would like us to discuss in future episodes.

FF&M enables you to own your own PR.

Edited by Milun Haggipavlou. Recorded, edited & published by Juliet Fallowfield, 2023 MD & Founder of PR & Communications consultancy for startups Fallow, Field & Mason. Email us at [e-mail] or DM us on instagram @fallowfieldmason.

FF&M recommends:

• LastPass the password-keeping site that syncs between devices.
• Google Workspace is brilliant for small businesses
• Buzzsprout podcast 'how to' & hosting directory
• Canva has proved invaluable for creating all the social media assets and audio bites.
• For contracts check out Law Depot.

MUSIC CREDIT Funk Game Loop by Kevin MacLeod. Link &

Text us your questions for future founders. Plus we'd love to get your feedback, text in via Fan Mail

Support the show