With all the incredible advances in technology comes a never-ending struggle to tend to your endless notifications. In the workplace, especially the freelancing and entrepreneur arena, this translates to being reachable 24-7 and raises expectations of clients to near unrealistic levels. If you’re a client-centred service you might have experienced personal sacrifice to satisfy these demands. This comes at the cost of mental health and manifests as worker burnout.

Burnout at work is a prevalent but under-discussed topic. It’s often unrecognised until you’re in crisis and can disable the overwhelmed worker with flow-on effects felt particularly hard by freelancers. Each and every one of us, either directly or indirectly, has seen the effects this can have and a common question from the time-poor worker emerges: how do I deal with and prevent it?

Enter Rachel Kelly: a long-standing friend and self-proclaimed Jill-of-all-trades, Rachel has enjoyed a multitude of jobs in freelance graphic design, social media marketing and copywriting before a travel writing job gave her the taste of an office-less lifestyle - one she found too delicious to give up. She embarked on her own as an entrepreneur freelancer but found she missed the comradery and social aspect of an office environment and was underwhelmed with her sad office parties of one. Around this time, a salaried dream job was withdrawn at the last minute leading to job stress though with the silver lining of a newfound sense of self-determination. Through her own patronage of co-working spaces, she identified an area of need for like-minded women paving the way for the foundation of Make Lemonade: a Toronto-based co-working space for entrepreneurial women.

In this episode, Rachel discusses her tactics for dealing with overwhelm at work and strategies to prevent it by employing achievable daily practices.

LINKS:

Rachel Kelly’s co-working space for women in Toronto, CA: Address: 326 Adelaide Street West, Toronto

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• Website: www.makelemonade.ca
  
• Instagram: @makelemonadeco
  
• Newsletter: www.makelemonade.ca/magic
  

The Breathing App: https://eddiestern.com/the-breathing-app/