I’m not going to beat around the bush, so let me say it straight out: Burnout showed me that I was a bad entrepreneur.

Although I had a good business idea, and the company was making money, I wasn’t doing the work of an entrepreneur. I was doing the work of an employee.

I had left my job a couple of years previously with the primary goal of becoming free. But the prison that I had created for myself was worse than my previous job. Much worse.

Although I discovered, after leaving my job, that I was willing to work much harder in my own business than when I was working for someone else, I came to realize that hard work was my main problem.

Contrary to most people’s expectations, hard work is not the best route to business success. The truth is closer to the opposite.

For me hard work led to devastating breakdown (you can read more about it in the book Freedom Entrepreneur).

So, with an aspiration of helping you avoid burnout, here are my top three recommendations:

1. Build in Freedom

As you grow your business, the most important advice is to remember to build in freedom. This means that you must make freedom your No. 1 priority at every step of the business development journey.

This is easier to say than to do, especially for control freaks (I mean that in the nicest way, as most successful entrepreneurs most definitely fall into this category). And so here is a question that you can ask yourself at least once per day:

Am I building freedom into what I am doing?

Another way to ask the question is this: Is what I am doing now going to increase my workload?

These questions are essential because all entrepreneurs tend to imagine that they are the ONLY ones who can do the job properly. Its this kind of thinking (which is usually incorrect by the way) that leads to burnout.

So as you start a new business venture, or as you create a new product/service, or as you adopt a new way that your business will operate, always bear in mind my main mantra: Freedom First For Founders!

2. Monitor your Stress

The biological effect of hard work on the human body is that it produces stress hormones. We all know that stress hormones force the body into ‘survival mode’ where adrenaline is pumped into the heart – enabling heightened awareness and quicker reactivity to possible danger. Blood is rushed to the extremities – enabling either running or fighting. The digestive system closes down – enabling large quantities of energy to be diverted elsewhere. The brain is washed with stress chemicals – promoting very rapid decision-making.

The problem with this kind of decision-making is that its binary - its black and white. Will this action kill me or will it save my life? There is no room for subtleties.

So not only is hard work stressful. It also leads to poor decision-making.

Compounding the problem is the fact that hard work and stress are self-reinforcing. Although we instinctively know that stress is bad for us, we often choose to ignore it. Especially when we are doing hard work. We might delude ourselves into believing that we are “really not too stressed”, or that the stress we are experiencing will be a short-term phenomenon.

But while our bodies are able to deal with (and perhaps even thrive on) short periods of stress, prolonged stress will lead to illness and breakdown (also known as burnout).

So, keep an eye on your stress levels. Do something anti-stressful every day. Options include yoga, meditation, talking with a friend, or even simply going for a (slow) walk.

3. get help

By this I don’t mean ‘go see a shrink’, although that can of course be useful. What I am referring to here is obtaining assistance for you as the business founder.

This could be human assistance (for example you could taken on an employee, whether full time or part-time), technological assistance (for example software that can automate some of your processes) or advice assistance (being open to obtaining external advice can be critical for business success).

Ask yourself: what do I need to do or know that that will help my business to grow without leading to my own hard work?

Overall, remember to be kind to yourself.

Freedom Entrepreneur strives to give business creators the tools they need to avoid burnout and to maximize profit