Resting in your genius is a helpful route out of burnout

Bed rest and relaxing is intuitively understood as the solution to burnout, alongside meditation, exercise, connection and eating well.

But often a missing ingredient for healing is getting to experience being in your genius. 

And by genius, I don’t mean being a savant or exceptionally intelligent.

I mean the skills that you intuitively grasp, innately excel in and enjoy getting mastery in.

Take me for example, I’m a great public speaker.

I feel more at ease on stage than in most small talk conversations. 

I have a sense of being a prism, like an energy moves through me and expands into the crowd. 

Jokes come naturally, I hit the notes of my content well and I know how to keep the audience engaged. 

I once did a presentation to my advertising peers at a training event, that inspired a colleague to cry. 

This had nothing to do with the content, and everything to do with the presence and realness that I brought to that moment.

So when the world closed down during covid, and everything moved online, I lost access to expressing that powerful part of myself.

I hosted Zoom workshops, but they couldn’t replicate that feeling.

Burnout settled into my body over that period due to a mix of reasons; and to resolve this I did all of the healing modalities, had lots of rest, exercised, was creative and made wonderful connections with people in my village. Still something was missing.

I needed to get back onstage. 

I started by reading my poetry at the Oxford Storytelling Festival. I followed this with a few performances at Catweazle, the famous open-mic night in Oxford. After this, I set up a poetry open mic-night in my village, which I then moved to a bigger venue in my local town and now I host one there every month. 

I get to MC and perform my writing in front of a crowd on a regular basis. 

That part of me is well and truly scratched. 

This shift didn’t happen over night, it took sensitive inner work to prioritise my expression over the other tasks on my to-do list, and also to handle the fear of failure that came up with organising such a public event in my area. I kept at it and now I get to relax into the fruits of that effort. 

I write this for those of you that are feeling burned out, you’ve tried a mix of modalities to help, you’ve rested, you’ve done the things but there’s a sense of aliveness that hasn’t returned. 

I offer this story in case it inspires you to look at your life and assess if you’ve got any space in your job, or hobbies, or family life, or volunteering roles that’s focused on what you’re innately good at, where you get to excel.