The interviewer (me) gets a chance to be interviewed by you!

Leader Assistant Podcast Ask Me Anything

In this Ask Me Anything episode of The Leader Assistant Podcast, I do my best to answer the following questions from assistants all over the world:

  • If you didn’t have to worry about money and paying your bills, what passion would you pursue?
  • If you could give one piece of advice to your younger self at the beginning of your career, what would it be?
  • What is your best piece of advice for maintaining a good work/life balance? Especially while working partially from home?
  • How do you avoid burnout when you are in a high capacity role and the expectations are very high?
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ABOUT ME

I’m a longtime executive assistant, international speaker and trainer, founder of The Leader Assistant Community and Premium Membership, author of the #1 Amazon Bestselling book, The Leader Assistant: Four Pillars of a Confident, Game-Changing Assistant, and host of the #1 podcast for assistants – The Leader Assistant Podcast.

I’ve worked with CEOs, professional athletes, Fortune 100 board members, billionaires, pastors—and their assistants—in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors.

I’ve also had the opportunity to speak at administrative professional and executive assistant conferences all over the world, including Hong Kong, Thailand, and Germany.

I’m currently EA to the Founder and CEO of Capacity, a fast-growing artificial intelligence SaaS startup with an AI-powered, support automation platform.

My passion is to help you lead well, resist burnout, and automate before you’re automated.

I live in Kansas City, MO with my amazing wife and 2 boys. My hobbies are podcasting, beer, music, stocks, and entrepreneurship.

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPT 

Podcast Outro  0:00  

Welcome to the Lido system podcast. Turn the volume up this next poll is good.

Podcast Intro  0:08  

The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident game changing leader assistants.

Jeremy Burrows  0:18  

Howdy friends. Thanks for tuning in to The Leader, Assistant Podcast and your host, Jeremy Burrows. And this is episode 124. You can check out the show notes at leaderassistant.com/124. I’m very excited. I can’t believe I am at 124 episodes. But here we are. Thanks for coming along for the ride. So I’m actually going to do the next few episodes are going to be an Ask Me Anything series. So you’ve asked me questions via email via Facebook via LinkedIn at virtual webinars that I’ve done, and I’ve kind of gathered these questions and I’m split them up into four or five episodes to Yeah, answer them for you. So this is going to be a little bit different of a format to mix it up, had a great interview with an Hyatt former executive business partner to Jeff Bezos, as well as Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo now, and Eric Schmidt, at when he was the CEO of Google. So great interview last week. That’s episode 123. But we are going to shift to this Ask Me Anything format for the next few episodes. If you have questions that you’d like me to answer in a future episode, please email your questions to podcast at leader asst.com. That’s podcast at leader assistant.com. I will add your question to the list and answer it in a future episode. Okay, let’s jump into today’s questions. The first one comes from Beth L. Beth asks, if you didn’t have to worry about money and paying your bills? What passion would you pursue? Beth? That is a great question. Thank you for submitting it. I would say I’m really passionate about outdoors, and music. So if I really didn’t have to worry about money and paying bills, honestly, I’d probably get really into producing music like I would, I might actually do this anyway a little bit. If I have some time. Like getting back into playing guitar, we’d learn a little bit more about electronic music, and loops, and drum pads, all that kind of fun stuff. But I would love to spend my days just creating music, different types of music, and hiking in the mountains. So those are the passions I would pursue. I’d be hiking in the mountains outdoors, with my family, my wife and boys and making music all day every day just sounds really really fun. If I didn’t have to worry about trying to make money from that music, so thanks again for the question, Beth. Yeah, that’s a good one. All right. So Catherine, P. Catherine asks, If you could give advice to your younger self, at the beginning of your career, what would it be? I would say, at the beginning of my career, man, this is always a tough one. Because there’s so much that I would want to tell myself, tell my younger self. But if I’m gonna have to choose one, because Katherine says if I could give one piece of advice I would say don’t put all your eggs in one basket. And I’ve talked about this before in some other episodes, and I’ve talked about this in my book, the leader assistant, but I made the mistake of having all of my friends, all of my financial income, all of my community in one organization in one, one job, and I would definitely tell my younger self to diversify and invest in a more more broad and diverse career savings account. Because when the you know what hit the fan. I pretty much had to start over and so I definitely am a fan of multiple streams of income and not putting all your eggs in one basket. So great question, Katherine. Hope Lita answers it for you. Next question is from Amy. B. Amy asks, What is your best piece of advice for maintaining a good work life balance, especially while working from home. So I talk a lot about burnout. And I talk a lot about this in prior episodes and in my book, but my best piece of advice is set boundaries. With your executive, with your colleagues, with your family, say, Hey, listen, you know, my executive and I, we do something where Monday and Wednesday nights are kind of our set aside work late nights. But then the other nights, we don’t work late. And so we basically have it set up so that we, our families know what to expect. So our families can trust that we’re not going to just work late every night, and they don’t never don’t ever know. But also, they know that Monday nights are focused, you know, Dad’s going to be focusing on work on Monday night, or I, you know, with my family, I take a couple hours on Saturdays, to work on the podcast. And so they just know, hey, I’m Dad’s going to go heads down on the podcast for a couple hours. And he’s going to hang out with you. So just setting up these boundaries and schedule on both sides, professional and personal, really, really helps maintain a balance. And really I like to call a life balance, not necessarily work life balance, because we all have one life, it’s just more balance. And, yeah, so boundaries, rhythms, you know, work out with your executive, a 24 hour stretch period every weekend where you don’t check email, or slack or Microsoft Teams or call each other unless it’s truly an emergency. That’s one of the best ways to set boundaries or when the best way is to maintain that balance. And then on a related note, Don M asks, How do you avoid burnout when you’re in a high capacity role, and the expectations are very high. So going back to my last point about boundaries, burnout happens when we are all in on one thing. And we don’t know how to shut it off. And so even if you have a high capacity, high expectation role, if you take those 24 hour stretches every weekend, where you’re, you’re totally disconnected. If you have those rhythms in place, where certain nights you know you’re going to work late and other nights are off limits, you’re not going to work late, you’re just going to force yourself to say no, then you can work in those high capacity, high expectation roles, and really do well for a long time and have a sustained tenure, if you will, in that role. So I recommend the boundaries thing. I also recommend hobbies. So find a hobby that will challenge you and really stimulate your creativity so that you can do something outside of work that energizes you. That’s one of the best ways I found to resist burnout as well. And again, I talk about that a lot in my book. That’s the entire pillar four of my book is about exercising self care. And I talked about burnout, creep. Burnout, that’s in chapter 23, and in burnout, stressors and signs and chapter 24. And then the antidotes to burnout in chapter 25. So thanks for the question, Don. Hopefully, that’s helpful. Definitely can dive in deeper in pillar four of my book, the leader assistant, and you can check out that book at amazon dot leader assistant.com. And the ebook is only $1.99 For the month of July on Amazon. So Amazon dot leader assistant.com All right, well, Beth, Catherine, Amy and Don, thank you so much for the questions. In this episode 124 of The Leader Assistant Podcast. Next week’s episode will be some questions from an anonymous assistant. She preferred to be anonymous. And we’re going to talk about a couple of scenarios that she’s struggling with her executive in being her executive being difficult. So if you’re driving in your car listening to this, honk your horn if your executive can be difficult at times, just make sure nobody’s around so you don’t cause a wreck. But yeah, hopefully you can check that out episode 125 Next week, look forward to chatting with you then. Hope you like this new format. If you have questions, email them to podcast at leader asst.com And I’ll add them to the list. To add on a future episode, have a great week and talk soon. My daddy has stinky feet

Podcast Outro  10:19  

please loom you on Apple podcasts. Goburrows.com

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