Meet Emily Heird

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Emily Heird. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Emily, thank you for joining us today and sharing your experiences and acquired wisdom with us. Burnout is a huge topic these days and so we’d love to kick things off by discussing your thoughts on overcoming or avoiding burnout

In 2019, I had been practicing as a mental health therapist for 8 years and been in management/leadership for almost as many in the field. I went from leadership in a corporate agency to opening my own business in 2015 and I was living the life of hustling – working tons of hours, seeing clients, growing the business, leading employees, serving on a Board, AND doing everything on the home front from all the responsibilities with a 2.5 year old daughter who was allergic to sleep to mowing the lawn.

I had a tremendous amount of stress and wasn’t doing anything to take care of myself or release stress. I put everyone before me believing there was “no time” for me. My coping strategies were to be fueled by copious amounts of coffee all day long, not eat breakfast or lunch, have a drink after work, stay up late every night watching true crime documentaries (no point in going to sleep, my daughter was just going to wake me up in a few hours!), get up exhausted the next day – rinse and repeat! No one knew what I was dealing with and in fact, one of my friends said “I can’t believe you have the energy to do everything you do!” My thought was: “Energy? I feel dead inside.”

I hit a major wall with burnout after a life-changing moment with my daughter in the fall of 2019. It illuminated the fact that I wasn’t the mom I wanted to be and a loud voice came into my mind in this moment of crisis and said “Enough of this BS, Emily, you HAVE to take care of yourself!”

I didn’t know it was called burnout back then; all I knew was I had a tremendous amount of stress and wasn’t doing anything to take care of myself. The very next day, I started to turn my habits and approaches to life around. I put into action what I know science says are the best ways to relieve stress and gain energy: exercise (started with 20 minutes of walking), eating well, and working on my mindset. Over time, I prioritized going to sleep (gave up Netflix True Crime), quit drinking alcohol, started eating healthy and fueling my body well, and reconnected with life-long hobbies. I worked on my mindset, spend time in nature every day as a non-negotiable, and continue to monitor my levels of stress. Working as an entrepreneur and building my second business, it can be easy to fall into old patterns, but I have the awareness to spot them and reset.

This experience with burnout fueled the creation of my high-performance and burnout coaching company.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

After my experience with burnout in 2019/2020, I transitioned my mental health work to focus on high-performance and burnout coaching for professionals in high-stress industries (I started with specifically the legal industry). I noticed in my therapy work with these types of clients, and in my own experience, that their mental health (or as i refer to it, mental fitness) was suffering not because they had an organic mental illness, but the underlying culprit was chronic unmanaged stress due to the demands of work. Professionals are not taught in school the psychological skills they need to meet the demands of the environment.

I took my professional experience working with clients & in leadership across a few industries, graduate level education in sports psychology, and certification in mental performance mastery and started my coaching company: Vantage View Coaching. I work 1:1 with high-achieving professionals and provide workplace training on leadership + well-being + culture, and speaking engagements.

I’ve historically focused on lawyers and the legal industry for the last 5 years and am expanding to focusing on leaders and teams for corporate, legal, financial, and healthcare industries. If companies want to make the largest impact on employee well-being, they will invest in training their leaders to lead well and create high-performing cultures. All of this positively impacts the bottom line of the business and improves the mental health of employees. When people are less stressed and burned out because of work, it has a positive impact on the home and family life.

Helping people live a better quality of life has always been my passion and my calling (one I avoided for a few years after college). I love the coaching work because it gives me an opportunities to expand the impact I have and live out my purpose to a broader extent.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

I was fortunate enough to have psychology and mental health as my background, education, and experience. They always say it’s easier to give someone advice than it is to follow it yourself. I was speaking to clients all day long about taking care of themselves. I had completed more graduate level education in sports psychology in 2018 and had a wealth of skills and strategies in my pocket that I had to put into practice.

To overcome burnout, the main skills were: 1. to decide I did have enough time for self-care, 2. look to the science for what makes the largest impact with the shortest amount of time investment, and 3. to tolerate and push through the discomfort of changing habits and patterns.

If you are recognizing you are experiencing burnout, my main advice is to STOP, pause, and assess the changes that need to be made before it gets worse.

There are 12 stages of burnout – it’s a path that is laid out. We can see exactly where we’re headed if no changes are made. But it’s easy to ignore it or think you’ll start taking care of yourself when things slow down (they never do).

Pick one habit to work on (e.g., less screen and scrolling time) and replace that with an activity that will give you a higher ROI on energy and stress relief (e.g., walking, talking to a friend, being in nature, engaging with arts and creativity, etc.).

Start small and build on progress. Look at your energy as a bank account. Are you making deposits or only taking withdrawals? Where can you step back from responsibilities to open up capacity? Weave in micro-breaks throughout the day to release stress and restore energy.

We often think we need to work harder for success or in times of stress. What people need is more recovery. Focus on recovery for a month and see the difference it makes (sleep, nutrition, exercise + nutrition, social connection, and mindset).

You are worth the investment.

How would you describe your ideal client?

My ideal clients are what I call “corporate athletes.” The people whose careers require them to use their intelligence and brain power to perform their best on the field day in and day out. They may not be doing gymnastics at the Olympics, but they are performing mental gymnastic all day long.

They are typically strivers and leaders in high-pressure careers such as corporate, legal, financial, and healthcare industries. People who deeply care about their individual career success and the success of their team. Ones who want to have success at work and have a home life they enjoy. It’s easy to be bogged down in all the to-dos at work and home.

The individuals either recognize signs of burnout and want to turn it around or they want to level up their performance to have even better results in their career individually or to help their team succeed.

I also work with corporate and organizations to provide workplace training on topics related to high-performance, well-being, leadership, and culture so anyone who is reading this who work in roles responsible for bringing in support to their staff to help improve workplace well-being and success metrics is an ideal client.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.vantageviewcoaching.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emilyheird/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-heird/
• Other: Note – my website is currently under construction but it will hopefully be up within the next week or so.

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