Michael Levitt

About Michael Levitt

Michael Levitt is the founder & Chief Burnout Officer of The Breakfast Leadership Network, a San Diego and Toronto-based burnout media firm. He is an in-person and Certified Virtual Speaker, a Certified NLP and CBT Therapist, a Fortune 500 consultant, bestselling author, and hosts the Breakfast Leadership Show, a top 200 podcast on iTunes. Michael's A Top 20 Global Thought Leader on HR & Culture with Thinkers360. and a former Healthcare executive, overseeing $ 2 Billion budgets.

As a guest of your show, I would love to share how I beat burnout, which is impacting many people right now, due to working from home, the pandemic, etc.

My workplace burnout took place back in 2009/10, where my extreme burnout led to my year of worst-case scenarios.

I was working as a healthcare executive, and I was working from 6am-11pm 7 days a week. I was constantly receiving and sending emails, eating fast food for my 3 meals of the day, and I stopped doing things I enjoyed to do, because I was severely stressed out.

Between May 2009 and May 2010, I had a heart attack that should have killed me, lost my job during the economic recession, had my car repossessed, and my home foreclosed, all in a period of 369 days.

It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

It gave me a chance to reinvent myself, and design a life that is free from burnout. It took time, but I learned self-care techniques, as well as how my thoughts and behaviors led to my burned out state.

While this happened over a decade ago, I see similarities to the #WFH burnout that so many are facing now during COVID-19, and my story unfortunately could be happening to people across the globe.