Ep226 Michelle Niemeyer - Bending Time: How High Achievers Can Get More Done Without Burning Out

Michelle Niemeyer 0:00

Part of burnout is you feel disempowered, and you feel like you've been tilting at windmills for a long time and beating your head against the wall and nothing's happening. What you do have power to do is affect your own ability to perceive things and then to respond in a way of your choice.

Mike O'Neill 0:17

Welcome to get unstuck and on target, the weekly podcast that offers senior leaders insights and strategies to not only lead with confidence and vision, but also to achieve groundbreaking results. I'm your host, Mike O'Neal. I coach top level executives on the power of ethical leadership to forge teams to be as united as they are effective in each episode, join me for insightful conversations with leaders just like you providing practical advice to help you get unstuck and propel you and your company forward. Let's get started.

Mike O'Neill 1:00

Feeling overwhelmed. Your to do list is endless, your calendar is packed, but you're still not getting ahead. My guest today, Michelle Niemeyer has been there a former attorney turned coach. She created the art of bending time to help high performers stay productive without burning out. In this conversation, Michelle reveals the early signs that you're running on empty and how to reclaim your focus, energy and joy if you've been moving fast but getting nowhere, this might be exactly the reset you need. Let's get to it. My guest today is Michelle Niemeyer. She's a speaker, coach and a former attorney who helps high achieving professionals do something that seems impossible, and that is get more done without burning out, after facing burnout herself in a demanding legal career, Michelle began a decade studying performance, mindset and wellness, the result the art of bending time a framework for staying sharp, productive and fulfilled even in high pressure environments. Her work challenges the belief that success requires sacrifice. Instead, she helps leaders reconnect to what matters and build careers that energize instead of drain.

Michelle Niemeyer 2:25

Michelle, welcome. Hi, Mike. How are you today? I am

Mike O'Neill 2:29

very good you and I have had chance to have a couple of conversations, and I've been looking forward to this conversation for a variety of reasons, and one that comes immediately to mind is that I know in my work with clients, it really seems that most of leaders, they're there, they aren't juggling too much. They're just kind of running on empty. And I'm thinking this conversation would be something that our viewers and listeners could benefit from. So I'm looking forward to doing just that. Do you mind we just jump right in.

Michelle Niemeyer 3:01

Not at all, not at all. And I love what you say about running on empty.

Mike O'Neill 3:07

Well, you know the impact of burnout, and I know that burnout can be somewhat sneaky as you kind of reflect on your own experience. What were some of those early signs that something deeper was going on?

Michelle Niemeyer 3:24

Yeah, and, and, and I will tell you the early signs were. I wasn't aware at the time that the early signs were signs of anything. So I liken to get getting burned out to being like a lobster in a pot of water getting cooked, and you don't know you're getting cooked, right? You have things are happening, but you might not realize that it's burnout, so you may start feeling detached and not as engaged at work you don't want to. And there is something I'm going to say, because I think this is burnout. A lot of the literature you see, and even the World Health Organization definition of burnout ties it to, quote, unquote, the workplace, not engage in the workplace. Well, the fact is, you're one whole human being. And what I've seen is that the things that happen are happening at home, and they're happening in your your community involvement. It's not just about at work, and I think it's really important for people to understand that, because we are whole human beings, and work is part of our whole life, and when we're experiencing this level of frustration, this level of disengagement, this need to like, withdraw, it's happening in all of our lives, and sadly, it doesn't just affect people's careers. It can result in divorces. It can result in poor family relationships with people's children. You know, because you're you're you become kind of a different person, and you become disengaged, and you become resentful, and you start to not see things the same way. You become kind of negative, not kind of negative. You become really negative. You start seeing and perceiving things differently, perhaps, than you did before. So if that's who you become, and it's, yes, it may have started with you're overextended because of your work obligations or because of, you know, for a lot of people, especially moms with kids, and you know, not to denigrate dads with kids who also have child rearing obligations, but a lot of times, it's the moms who take the brunt of it. Yes, they get burned out, in part, because they go straight from from a busy environment to a busy environment, and they have zero opportunity to rest, and, you know, not a minute to themselves, and that can be really hard. So you know, that is where I'm saying like the signs are often disengagement. They are a withdrawal, and a lot of times a really negative, pessimistic attitude toward maybe you loved what you did before and now you hate it. And if anybody asks you, you hate it, right? You just you're like I when I was in the worst part of burnout, if anybody had come to me with their kid who wanted to be a lawyer, I would have told them, Don't do it. And I would have told them all the reasons why being a lawyer is a terrible choice, and I think about that now I'm like, how many kids dreams did I stomp on? I mean, really, seriously, but there are you feel like you don't have power to fix the things, and what you don't recognize is you never had power to fix the things. What you do have power to do is affect your own ability to perceive things and then to respond in a way of your choice, and that can fix the things over time, right? If everybody did that. But when we start out feeling disempowered, I think that's a big part of burnout, is you feel disempowered and you feel like you've been tilting at windmills for a long time and beating your head against the wall, and nothing's happening, and whether it's that you're just doing this enormous amount of work and you don't feel the benefit of it, I found as a litigation attorney working in litigation, you work for months and sometimes years on a case, and it takes so long, and it takes you get, you wait for results, you file an appeal, and you argue the appeal, and it can take six months before you get an answer. By the time the you get the answer, you're kind of like, okay, like it's, it's, you don't even feel the joy of the victory, because it's been so long, and your client is frustrated. They've paid all this money, they haven't gotten a result. They're complaining and and you're part of this system, right? For me, that was a big frustration in law, was I was part of a system which was almost set up to cost a lot of money, take a lot of time and have big delays, and meanwhile, you have clients that, for them, it's life and death. For them, it's the biggest thing that ever happened to their business, or in my case, I handled insurance claims for policyholders. So it could be, you know, their home, which is their biggest investment, and it's sitting there in rubble, and they can't get somebody to even remove the rubble from the lot, and they've got the city coming after them, and they've got, you know, repercussions from this they had. They're living in a hotel, and I'm the person who's trying to get the insurance company to pay, and I might get that insurance company to pay, but when it takes two years for it to happen, those people's lives have been altered in ways that aren't even comprehensible, and it wasn't through anything I did, but I'm the point of contact, so I feel that right. And that can be really hard, and it can be very draining, and, you know, so we need to have I found those signs are very small. Now for me, I got an autoimmune disease. I truly believe that, in a way, autoimmunity is caused by genetic predispositions, which are triggered, they can be triggered by your environment, and they can be triggered by stress. So did I get an autoimmune disease because of being a bird out lawyer. Maybe I don't know, right? I'll never know for sure. I've been told the thing I have is often triggered by chemicals, hydrocarbons. I lived on a boat for eight years. That could be, why? Right? Because the boats have lots of things that you. I have chemicals and mold and things like that, so who knows, but the you know, I had experienced things that I knew when I reduced stress, they'd get better, short term memory issues, one of the things that I noticed was at one point, I couldn't if I wanted to write down a phone number, I'd look at where it was written down, and I'd go to write down the phone number, and I couldn't remember the whole phone number. I'd have to look back or an address, or, you know, there was a time in my life where that was, you know, you just wrote down the phone number. Probably even remembered it. There were things like that. There was one event I experienced at the worst part of this, and before I was diagnosed of the autoimmune thing where someone called me at my office, I had an automated system to keep time, and it tied into phone notes. So every time someone called me, I would open up a note. I'd write the notes. It would be timing me. It would go into my time system and into my case management so that I had the phone notes. This man calls. I'm talking to him. I don't remember the call at all, like 00, I didn't know who he was after I, you know, it was clear he talked to me, and I acted like he talked to me, but the fact of the matter was, he was calling to follow up on things we'd talked about. And I went on, I went into my notes, and the day before I had talked to him, and I had five pages of notes from talking to this man. That was probably what they call brain fog, which is a symptom of autoimmunity, but it's also, you know, they're finding that people in very high levels of stress have short term memory issues like that. Michelle,

Mike O'Neill 11:54

you have shared that you didn't really pick up on those early warning signs until you were well into these signs that you've described, you've described the nature of your work, how incredibly intense it was that the nature of your work might take literally years for issues to resolve. What led you to conclude, I can't and or should not continue doing this. I need to make a shift there. What was that trigger that led to you now coaching and teaching people on how to deal with these issues?

Michelle Niemeyer 12:31

I actually got education as a coach to help myself when I got the autoimmune diagnosis, I wanted to learn how to best address that, and so I went to a coaching school for 42 weeks of about 10 hours a week of education on nutritional health coaching, and it involved a lot of other things as well. And then I got very into personal development, and I realized I was feeling much better, and I was liking my job again. And when I chose not to be a lawyer anymore, it wasn't because I hated being a lawyer, it was I had started doing work, working with other people, helping them with this. I'd created some courses for lawyers, and I was getting incredible feedback from people who said it changed their lives, and I realized I was getting a lot more out of that from a personal perspective than I did from doing law work, and decided to make a shift

Mike O'Neill 13:36

in what way did your legal training, your legal experience result in you being a great coach, a great teacher of what is it we're going to be talking about, particularly the art of bending time.

Michelle Niemeyer 13:52

I'm not going to say my legal education helped me with that at all. Honestly, I I was a very good lawyer, in part because I had these skills that I came into law with. I had been a head hunter in the tech industry. Before I was a lawyer, I was very good at talking to people and getting out of them what mattered to them, and then helping them connect with a job that gave them those things. And as a lawyer, I was great at taking depositions, and it was because I had that skill. It wasn't something they taught me in law school, but it was something I practiced and I did a lot of while I was a lawyer.

Mike O'Neill 14:32

I understand that good coaches are good coaches by the questions they ask if you are good at depositions, you know the types of questions that elicit the information you need to kind of go into the record in your work as a coach, it sounds to me, you're trying to elicit self awareness on your client's part,

Michelle Niemeyer 14:57

absolutely, and you know, one. Of the things that I've seen that's very important. It's the question, but it's also not just the words that come out of somebody's mouth, but the way those words are said, and what they're not saying, and what's their body language, and all of that together gives you an understanding, and I'm very intuitive, a feeling from someone where you might want to follow through and ask more,

Mike O'Neill 15:25

as someone who is intuitive, you can pick that up in others, but you shared earlier. You didn't pick up on some of these quote warning signs in your own self. Is that Is that common? You think

Michelle Niemeyer 15:40

it probably is. You know, in my case, I saw things that I had seen my grandmother's experiencing. For instance, they would complain about how their joints hurt, and I had joint pain. And I just thought that was natural, that was aging. I'm now in my 30s, or whatever, and I have joint pain. So that must be normal, right? And I didn't know until it was a long time later, and I had gone through all this education, and I'd done an anti inflammatory diet and cut out things that were bothering me that I realized that I no longer had joint pain, and now I'm in my 50s, not my 30s, right? And I feel good. So it wasn't normal, and it's the same for the things related to burnout, there's, I think you kind of just think, Okay, I've been a lawyer for 20 years. Of course, I'm not feeling the same about it, right, right?

Mike O'Neill 16:36

You know, Michelle, you teach clients how to bend time. What does that really mean?

Michelle Niemeyer 16:42

What it means is getting the most out of the time you have. Everybody has the same amount of time, right? We all have 24 hours in a day. You know, if you're a lawyer, you're counting it in six minute increments, but I might get more done in an hour than someone gets done in eight hours because, and this is where I you mentioned fuel before, or energy if you don't have the right fuel, if you're tired, if you're not eating well, and It affects your energy, if you're not exercising at all, and it affects your energy, you're not going to be able to stay focused for as long, and you're not going to be able to keep you know, you end up spinning. You end up losing attention. And so your hour now has turned into two hours to get the same amount done. Yes, the other piece of it that I'm really big on is is integrating other people, having a team and working together. Because when you have teamwork and you have people whose knowledge you can draw upon, or people who can help you with an aspect of something, learning to do something you didn't know you can shortcut what you're doing to the point where it might take a month instead of a year. That's also bending time.

Mike O'Neill 18:15

Yeah, I wasn't expecting that second part, and that is, how can those around you help you and the team itself bend time. When your clients get it, how do they begin looking at time? Do they look at time differently when they've kind of captured this idea in it and it sticks? Yeah, because

Michelle Niemeyer 18:40

it becomes a different thing. So one of the things that we do very early on is get clarity on who we are and what we want. What makes me light up, what makes me excited? What am I proud of? And when I accomplish it, it makes me feel great. And that's not the same for everybody. So if you know what that is in you, that's that's a big burnout prevention. If you're getting those sparks, I call it getting sparks every day, proactively getting those sparks every day in what you're doing, and when you recognize these are my values, this is what matters to me. And you plan that you put that into your plan for what matters to you in your life, and you build your goals around that. You're not looking at time in a time sense at all. You're looking at it in a sense of what matters to me right now, and how do I get that done? And if it's a work goal, you've made a plan, you've figured out how to get that into your calendar, how to get the elements of it in but as you know, as as a coach, you know, there's the 8020 rule. We get 80% of the results out of 20% of the effort. So if we have good focus. If we know what matters, we don't spend that 80% of the time that's a waste. We do more productive time, and we get more done because of it, and we get stuff done that brings us more towards something that we're aligned with, and that's going to make us happy.

Mike O'Neill 20:18

I don't know if I can paraphrase what you just said, but let me make a stab at this. What I understood is that oftentimes the way you begin your work with clients, it starts with that idea of clarity, helps them and find the clarity, and once that clarity is identified, then you begin building back with that being the lens in which they look at things up to and including time.

Michelle Niemeyer 20:47

Yes, gotcha and and so when they're looking at, am I spending my time on A or B? I do I do something we call a sword analysis on three big goals and a sword analysis is a business school calls it SWOT, yeah, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities. Now, ironically, I learned this from a Venezuelan business coach and his work, his acronym was floor, the results, the risks. I say with a ice goes, I think it's threats in English if you go to an American business school. But the idea is that you're figuring out, what are you going to get from this goal, what is it going to cost you? What's the what's the opportunity cost? What do you have already? What do you need? Right? And then I, we go through this and very deeply. And then we, at the end of that analysis, I ask the person, one to 10, how much do you want it? And when we do that, a lot of times, people don't want it more than like a five or a six or a seven. And if this is your three big goals, these are your three big goals. I've asked for if it's only a six, my next question is, why is it only a six? Yes. And what happens is, when they've done that analysis, they realize they've been carrying around something that they've wanted since they were a kid, or an expectation that their parents had, that they that they need to get a graduate degree, or, you know, now they now they own a successful business, and they still think they need a graduate degree, but they really don't, and they've been taking classes here and there, and spending money and time away from their families. And so that takes, literally, sometimes takes away a huge chunk of wasted time that people are using towards something, and on the flip side of it, if it's a goal they really want, we use that analysis as the framework to build their team around it, and then to build a growth Plan.

Mike O'Neill 22:57

And that growth plan could be personal or organizational,

Michelle Niemeyer 23:02

yes or right. So they maybe they need a certificate, or they need a license, or there's some educational element, or they need to save money to pay for the thing that they really want. Or they, you know, they need to build the team and grow in a way that maybe they have to learn to speak better, maybe they have to build some level of confidence, whatever that is for them, we work that into the growth plan.

Mike O'Neill 23:30

Gotcha, you know, as I'm kind of listening to you describe this, I can see how this can apply in so many different ways. Can I ask you to kind of reflect back on your time you've probably already answered it, yeah, in the theme of this podcast about helping leaders kind of get unstuck. Can you share an example where you found yourself stuck, and what did it take to get unstuck,

Michelle Niemeyer 24:01

as I said, as I said very concisely to you earlier, when we talked about this, I was a lawyer for 33 years, which is a very long time to be in a profession that at some point you knew, on a gut level, wasn't fully fueling you. And I do believe that if we can, it's, it's a goal to be in a profession or a job that allows us to embody that thing that makes us feel really good, right? And, you know, for me, I found law to be isolating. There's, you know, you see the TV shows of people in court and all that. And it's not as it's often, even if you're working in a large law firm, you're working in a little private box with your computer screen in front of you, and most of the work you're doing is very isolating. It's not integrative. It's isolating. If that's what you like, great. It's not what I. Like and so I found myself doing all kinds of things outside of law that gave me more contact with humans. And that's, you know, that's one thing I tell people like you. If you want to get out of being burned out, you need to find ways to get those things that light you up, whether it's in your work or outside of your work. You need to have those things, or you will get extremely burned out. So that was something for me, but ultimately, I made the decision to leave law and frankly, out of a sense of commitment to my clients and not wanting to leave anybody hanging, I stayed in it. I had my last case. I called it the case from hell that will not go away. It was in 2019 I was hired on a call from a referring former opposing counsel who said, you know, this is like so clear cut, and as soon as they get they find out that somebody's involved, who knows what they're doing, they're gonna back off and whatever. And I'm like, Yeah, Famous last words, that never happens. But what I wasn't expecting, too is that covid happened and the courts got slowed down to a like, just a major stall. And what was supposed to be, maybe at worse, a two year situation turned into four and a half. But, you know, during that time it was interesting, I didn't feel stuck at all. I actually was loving what I was doing, and it was my biggest, I'll say, in a way, my biggest success. I had never felt particularly good at appeals, and I won three. I won two, first circuit appeals, and it settled during the third one, which was wonderful. So that was exciting.

Mike O'Neill 26:50

You mentioned that you were very successful in law. You were winning cases, but you used the word but you really weren't fully filled, and that you had to go outside of your profession to address those, those issues. You know, you opened our time together talking about burnout, as it's oftentimes limited to the context of just work. And what you're describing is you had to get outside of work to begin refilling, if you would. To what extent nowadays, now that you're not a lawyer, but you're helping others with these kinds of things, where do you go to now? To kind of refill Michelle,

Michelle Niemeyer 27:35

I live my life in a way that fuels me. So I I don't have a, where do you go? In a sense of, I have my Saturday planned for x or like that, but I am a guardian of my time that I feel like gives me this kind of joy and connection. And, you know, I have a I don't do anything on my calendar before 10 in the morning. I'm not a morning person. I start my morning in a really relaxed way. I'm the opposite of that 5am guy

Mike O'Neill 28:12

you're speaking to one now,

Michelle Niemeyer 28:13

yeah, I can't do that, and I could do that. I shouldn't say that. If I woke up at 5am I could do that. But the places that I like to be aren't open yet at 5am so I tend to start my morning really relaxed, and then I take my dog for a walk, and I go to a place across the street where everybody knows me, and they know my dog, and they love my dog, and we have a lovely walk, and we meet, we meet people and chat with people along The way, and I have a beautiful view of the water, and sometimes I see dolphins and, you know, stuff like that, and it's a nice way to start the day. There was a time in my life when the way I started my day was I would, you know, jump out of bed when the alarm went off, I'd quickly shower, I'd throw on my work clothes, I'd get stuck in traffic, I'd get to the office, and I'd start without that space. And I need that space so that for me, that fuels me. And no matter what's going on, I might have to become an earlier morning person, but as long as I can control that time where I start at 10, so that I know that I can do all these things I want to do beforehand. I'll do that. Gotcha. It keeps me feeling grounded, it keeps me feeling calm, and then I can go into my day with a really good attitude, and in a place where I know what I want and I know where it's going.

Mike O'Neill 29:38

Michelle, I want to move to your final takeaway, you describe that you've set this up, by which you can be a guardian of time for those who are watching, for those who are listening, and they're concluding, goodness, I'm doing too much of the wrong thing. What might be one small step that they can take that might help them Re. Set that relationship with time.

Michelle Niemeyer 30:03

To me, the first step is to get clarity on what lights you up so and the reason is, it may not help you get your to do list done any faster right away, okay, but in, in in time, as you get a sense of what lights you up, what makes you happy, what kinds of things make you proud or make you feel a sense of accomplishment, or make you feel a sense of connection and relevance in the world? Right? You are able to focus more on those things, and then you can figure out, what are the things on that to do list that don't move me forward in these ways, maybe I can get an assistant. Maybe I can work in a way where the other people in my team and I have a deep conversation about this, who are we in what lights us up? And we can share the workload in a way that each of us gets something that we need out of our time at work, and we're getting all the work done, and now we're helping each other. So I would recommend doing a clarity exercise first, and then moving from there.

Mike O'Neill 31:09

That's a great suggestion. Michelle, thank you so much for this conversation and for your work, helping leaders reclaim their energy and and purpose. For those who want to reach out and connect with you, what's the best way for them to do so

Michelle Niemeyer 31:25

I have a text that I have people use. So if they're in the United States, they can do this, if not my I believe you have my website, and you can put that on your show notes, yes, but if they the text is to text the word clarity to 33777, so clarity to 33777, and that will put you into a community, and in that community you'll have a downloadable it's kind of like a meditation, where you can learn a little more about your clarity and some journaling prompts. And it also has a form you can use for the sword analysis that we talked about.

Mike O'Neill 32:07

So for those watching, for those listening, let me encourage you to do just that. It's a valuable resource. Michelle, thank you.

Michelle Niemeyer 32:15

You're welcome. Thank you for having me on your show.

Mike O'Neill 32:20

As I kind of wrap up our time together, Michelle, I'm going to invite our listeners to kind of reflect on this. If this episode gave you pause, if your calendar is full but your energy is low, I hope Michelle's insights will help you slow down and reconnect with what matters, and if you're ready to process what that shift might look like, I offer game plan sessions by invitation only focused two hour coaching sessions where we tackle one leadership challenge that really matters to you. There's no pitch, there's no pressure, just real coaching to help you move forward with clarity. If that sounds valuable, you'll find a link in the show notes, and therefore, I would like our listeners be mindful of take full advantage of what Michelle is offering. You may very well find she can be very much helpful, and you can reach out to her to learn more about what she does and how she helps. For those who are listening, I hope this episode has given you some insights and helped you to get unstuck and on target. Thank you for joining us for this episode of get unstuck and on target. I hope you've gained insights to help you lead with confidence and drive your organization forward. Remember, at bench builders, we're committed to your success, your leadership excellence and your strategic growth. If you've enjoyed our conversation today, please leave a review rate and subscribe to keep up with our latest episodes. This show really grows when listeners like you share it with others. Who do you know? Who needs to hear what we talked about today. Until next time, I encourage you to stay focused on the target and continue to break new ground on your leadership path.

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