The Cost of Coping

I'm good at handling things. Turns out that's not always a strength..

I've always been someone who sees an opportunity and thinks, let's do it.

I'll figure out the how afterwards.

It's probably one of the reasons I've built what I have. I've never been good at sitting around listing all the ways something might fail. An opportunity comes along, I get excited, I say yes, and then I work out how we're going to make it happen.

Most of the time, that's served me well.

But there's another side to being that person.

There's only so much time in a day. And if you keep saying yes without protecting the space for everything you've already committed to, eventually something gives.

When tiredness starts changing the way you think

I've hit burnout more than once. The last one hit hard.

The strange part was that I could physically stop working, but I couldn't switch off. I remember lying in the sun and not being able to enjoy it. Going for a coffee and not being able to just sit there.

I'd spent so long being always on, going from one thing to the next, that when there was finally nothing to do, I didn't know how to do nothing.

But the exhaustion wasn't just stopping me switching off. It was changing the way I thought, how I felt, how I was with the people around me.

When you're tired for long enough, ordinary problems start feeling bigger. Decisions feel heavier. You start questioning things you'd normally handle without a second thought.

That's where burnout and self-doubt get hard to tell apart.

Sometimes you question yourself because something genuinely needs to change.

Sometimes you question yourself because you're exhausted.

Sometimes you can't tell which.

And when you're in the middle of it, knowing the difference is really hard.

My response has always been to do more

This is where my personality doesn't do me any favours.

When I doubt whether I can do something, my instinct isn't to back off. 3 exits and 7 businesses are proof of that.

I go the other way.

I work harder. I try to solve it. I take it on. I prove to myself I can do it.

A lot of the time, that's been useful.

The problem is when you use the same response for everything.

Because if you're already running on empty, and your answer to doubt is always push harder, take on more, prove you can handle it, then you're feeding the exact thing that made you doubt yourself in the first place.

That took me a while to see.

I wasn't always solving the problem. Sometimes I was just making myself more tired.

Self-doubt isn't something I've beaten

I still get it.

I don't think success makes it disappear, and I definitely haven't conquered it.

I've just built a different relationship with it.

I've started seeing self-doubt as fuel, because I've noticed it usually shows up right before I do something uncomfortable, or something I've never done before.

There's that voice: can I actually do this?

And sometimes the only way to answer it is to go and do the thing. Once you have, you've proved something to yourself.

So the question I ask now isn't "Do I doubt myself?"

It's "Why am I doubting myself?"

Is it because I'm stepping outside my comfort zone into something new?

Or have I stretched myself so thin that I've lost perspective?

One kind of doubt is telling me to keep going. The other is telling me something has to change.

And they feel almost identical.

That's a big reason founders stay in burnout so long. We're so used to discomfort being part of growth that we treat every hard feeling as one more thing to push through.

I'm still learning the difference

I'm not going to pretend the answer is just slow down.

There are seasons in business where you have to graft.

I'm in one now.

I've got multiple businesses on the go. We're growing Unusual, building Succeed, developing the personal brand, and a few other things I'm genuinely excited about.

It takes time, and it comes with pressure.

I'm fine with that.

What I'm getting better at is spotting when a demanding season quietly turns into something else. When self-doubt stops pushing me forward and starts telling me the answer is just to do more.

Because I've been far enough down that road to know where it ends.

It's also why I'm writing the book

That last bout of burnout made me think a lot harder about the relationship between ambition, self-doubt and the pressure we put on ourselves.

It's what led me to the subject of my first book.

Not because I've beaten burnout. Not because I've solved self-doubt.

I'm writing about them because I've lived both, and I've seen how easily one feeds the other.

You get exhausted, so you start questioning yourself. You question yourself, so you push harder. You push harder, so you get more exhausted.

For me, it's been about understanding myself better inside that loop.

The book's still some way off, but I'll be sharing early previews, behind-the-scenes updates and more as we get closer.

→ Join the book waiting list​

And there's a business side to this too

The more I've thought about burnout, the more I've realised you can't fully separate the founder from the business they've built.

If everything depends on you, stepping back will always feel hard.

And if growth just means piling more responsibility onto your own shoulders, eventually something gives.

That's part of what I'll be covering on 2 September in my free webinar, Stand Out, Scale Up, Stay Profitable.

I'll break down how to build an agency that can genuinely scale, including the same fundamentals that shape what it's worth when the time comes to sell.

Because scale isn't just about winning more clients. It's about protecting your margins, building the right relationships and creating a business that becomes less dependent on you as it grows.

I've been on both sides of this. I built an agency from £100, scaled it and exited it, and there's a lot I understand now that I wish I'd understood while I was still in the thick of it.

→ Register for Stand Out, Scale Up, Stay Profitable​

This week's question

I've been asking myself a version of this lately:

Is this self-doubt telling me to grow, or telling me to stop and look at how much I'm carrying?

One is the discomfort of doing something new.

The other is exhaustion asking for your attention.

One final thought...

I don't want to become less ambitious.

Some of the best things I've done started with me saying yes before I had a clue how I'd pull them off.

I don't want to lose that.

What I'm trying to lose is the assumption that pushing harder is always the answer.

Self-doubt can be useful. It can push you into rooms you'd rather not walk into and make you prove things you weren't sure you could.

But when you're already running on empty, that same voice can send you completely the wrong way.

I'm just getting better at knowing which one I'm listening to.

Until next time,

Luke

Writer, The Success Method

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