Online courses are exploding as a marketing and business tool today, as people seek nontraditional methods to learn everything from juggling to fitness to my personal favorite, burnout recovery methods. But what many courses don’t tell you is exactly what you will be getting by enrolling. Sure, some guarantee an instantly profitable career or ten pounds of weight loss, but few explain their methods and plans for helping you achieve your goals. The Burnout Institute is different in that way, as I seek to run a fully transparent company that never holds back secrets from clients. All the “profit-only” values and sleazy marketing strategies we are all trying to escape (and honestly recover from) have done enough unnecessary damage on that front.

Instead, I’ll walk you through my course offerings, which follows a specific and results-backed process for recovering from burnout. I know it works because I did it myself, before this business was even a passing thought in my mind. I have traced my steps through my long and painful burnout journey to make yours manageable, and to give you all the support I didn’t have.

Along with my 12-week program, clients and burnout warriors benefit from the community we build together with others to create a system they can lean on, which is vital for true and lasting recovery. This is one thing you actually cannot do alone, even if you are the ultimate “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” type achiever. In fact, we learn about the five people you need in your burnout recovery village. That’s five, not one.

Here’s a brief overview of the path we will walk together through my FREEDOM method:

#1 Feeling

The first thing we all bravely approach together is the feelings burnout warriors associate with their perceived failure, often in the competitive corporate setting. We work towards eliminating shame, welcoming and fully exploring the feelings that have been contributing to your anxiety, and diving in deeper to places where self-doubt around your recovery live. It’s hard and important work.

#2 Reasoning

Most burnout warriors are intellectual and logical people who need to get back to just that: the logic behind their situation. After you’ve properly started processing intense feelings, we make room for logic to help increase our understanding of why we burned out. When we step back to consider objectively insane expectations of employees around the world, we can see why we are in this position.

#3 Evolving

We all have those things we’ve been told our whole life to do, to think, and to be. It’s time to undo those together, and to accept your beliefs not your programming as your new “north star.” This replenishment period is life-changing, and may have you realizing that you became a lawyer when you were meant to own an art gallery.

#4  Elevating

We rise together to embrace our self-worth, our gifts, and our “why” in this step. We relearn how to describe ourselves with confidence, embracing our new self-given titles. I now self-describe as an artist and entrepreneur. Who will you be when you let your old titles fall away and your true self to emerge? These clients found new roles for themselves, and are flourishing within them.

#5 Deciding

This is where we get to plan for your new and brighter post burnout future, and start to make the changes necessary to achieve it. While some may need to quit their job, others just need to self advocate in specific ways to make their current situation work differently for them. Others make plans for intentional self care, and commit to a plan that prevents backslide.

#6 OMing

If you haven’t been to a yoga class since, well, you got your job that led you to burnout, a quick refresher: the “om” is a 5,000-year-old meditative chant that you definitely want to implement, among other strategies. On this step we embrace our new high vibration life and exit the program able to truly live again.

I have so much more to teach you in the course about moving away from our #currentself towards our #futureself, the process of saying no to things you will no longer show up for, and more. Clients have described me as “high empathy meets high accountability” as a coach, a combination that means we will have fun and do the hard things to help you recover from burnout. I can’t wait to see you in my next course.

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Written by Jessica Walther, CEO of Itivate