There are a few times in the past five years of my business journey where I got truly burned out. I wasn’t just tired, I mentally and physically felt unable to motivate myself to do anything related to my business. I'd lost my spark. The ideas that usually flowed fast and excitedly just wouldn’t come. When this first happened, I saw it as a personal failing. “I must not be cut out for this” or “someone else could do this better”, I would tell myself.
But each time I've been burned out, I’d try to take some distance from my business. The first burn out, I took an entire month off from the kitchen. I focused on light planning for the rest of the year. I wasn’t sure I would be coming back. I even went so far as to tell the kitchen manager of the shared space I was using that I may pull out of my lease at the end of the month. But after a month of rest, I made it through.
Over time, as I’ve gone through burn out time and time again, I’ve started to recognize it for what it really is: redirection. I realized that I was tired because what I’d been doing up to that point wasn’t working. Whether it was the farmers market or wholesale, I was putting a lot of effort into things that weren’t providing any real returns. At the beginning of 2026, I started to feel burn out again.
So I sat down and I wrote. I wrote down all the ways I could expand the business this year without stretching myself even thinner. After a page full of handwritten scribbles, my mind started to clear. Most of the ideas I’d written down would be new ventures. As I started to share the ideas I was most hopeful for, the fog slowly started to lift.
When you’re tired and don’t feel like you can go on, sometimes it just means you need a break to re-evaluate. So take the rest. Write it down. Talk it out. And give yourself the space to go in a new direction.