PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Beon D: Well, welcome to this week’s episode of inspector toolbelt talk. I have my highly esteemed anchor host, Ian Robertson here.

Ian R: Can you say, anchor host? Isn’t that redundant? Isn’t an anchor always a host or how does that work?

Beon D: Why don’t know, to be honest, I was trying to think of a weird way to say your name, but I don’t know Ian Robertson, there are not many ways you can go with that, you know?

Ian R: Well, in school, they used to call me “Peein Ian”. That, that stuck with me for 40 years?

Beon D: Well, it’s about us. Stick a whole lot.

Ian R: Listen, Joe, I still remember you. If you’re a home inspector and listening to me right now.

Beon D: I am coming for you.

Ian R: It still bothers me.

Beon D: That was a light introduction to our podcast here. Anyways, moving on with the topic today is Inspector burnout. You know, it’s funny when you first suggested this topic, and you just sent, “I want to do one about inspector burnout”. The first thing that jumped in my mind was an inspector doing something wrong in the electrical box, and suffering from burnout but I’m guessing that’s not the kind of burnout we’re talking about.

Ian R: No, it’s the kind of burnout that sometimes we don’t like to talk about as business owners, because, you know, there’s a culture around building a business, working hard, getting things going, keeping things going. There’s also the factor of we’re human beings. Sometimes we push ourselves beyond our limits, which is a good thing, but continually doing that can sometimes create burnout. I find a lot of home inspectors are almost embarrassed to talk about it. I mean, well, first of all, the definition of burnout is the mental and physical exhaustion, you experience when the demands of your work consistently exceed the amount of energy you have available. You can look that up. That’s a Google reference. It’s been called the epidemic of the modern workplace. It’s something we don’t talk about but I think it’s an important subject because I’ve felt it before. I’m sure you’ve felt it Beon, right?

Beon D: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think what you are referring to is the stigma that is attached to burnout, or maybe the stigma that’s attached to saying, or admitting even to yourself that you’re suffering from burnout. It was interesting, one of the things I picked up is that burnout was classified as a stress syndrome. That was sort of how it was classified before but the World Health Organization actually recently changed the definition, from just referring to burnout as a stress syndrome. They now refer to it as a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress, that has not been successfully managed. It’s interesting because, you know, Stress Syndrome, almost implies weakness, “oh, man, you can’t deal with stress. So you got burned out.” That is not what we’re referring to because there’s maybe, you know, well, being guys, you know, this sort of macho image that, oh, no, I can handle it, I’m fine. I’m all good. If you’re a home inspector, most likely, you’re the breadwinner for your household. So you feel a lot of that responsibility and load and stress upon you, to provide for your family to make things work to keep going. Many times you don’t feel it’s right to stop and say, Man, I am stressed out, I’m a little burned out and I need to try and address this.

Ian R: Yeah, and it affects all of us. Maybe we’re not the sole breadwinner of our family even or, you talked about maybe the pride that a guy has of oh, I have to be tough and muscle through female inspectors, they’re gonna feel the same stress. I think a lot of it comes down to the overall situation we put into every day they say one of the most stressful things you can do in life is buying a home. We are put into situations every day, where we’re with a bunch of stressed-out buyers, stressed-out agents, and especially now low inventory and, you know, sellers not willing to fix things and we feel each other’s emotions as human beings. Some guys are fine. Some inspectors, they’re just kind of like, alright, I compartmentalize and I’m okay, good for you. But for the majority of us, we feel it. The clients called us stressed, the agents called stress where everybody’s stressed on site. That’s our day! day in and day out. The questions afterward. Did I miss something? Am I going to get sued? Is my report thorough enough? What about my marketing? You know, I have to go home and write reports. All of this just kind of piles on and running a business. It’s not easy. You can’t just say I’m going to wake up in the morning and go to work. You have to say well, I have to go out there and pound the pavement and talk to agents and leave my cards and work on my website. There’s a lot and it’s overwhelming sometimes.

Beon D: It is indeed. Maybe it also is good to clarify, you know, we all have a rough day, every now and again, sometimes we have a bad week or even a bad month. What we’re talking about here is when you reach the stage of burnout, it’s not just having a bad day or a bad month, it means you’re, you’re actually being physically and emotionally affected to such a point that you’re finding it harder to function as you normally do. I don’t know if you had any thoughts on that. It was amazing the resources of what things to look out for, to actually diagnose that you are suffering from burnout, you know, because all of us will maybe throw the term around, oh, man, I’m so burned out. When you really burned out that that’s a pretty serious condition that you need to give attention to?

Ian R: Well, yeah, and we could talk about the symptoms all day long, you’re gonna feel tired, you’re not going to enjoy the things that you enjoyed before. You’re stressed to wake up. There are all sorts of other different signs but we’ll never know when we hit the burnout phase until we come out of the burnout phase. It’s kind of like, well, I went on vacation not too long ago to Florida, and I’m just like, I’m gonna let go and eat some fried food. I ate fried food morning, noon, and night. I felt terrible after that full week, but I didn’t associate it with that. I’m like, oh, maybe I ate something bad or something. When I came back home, and I went back to eating good again, man, I feel amazing. This is great. So sometimes we go through with the junk food of life, so to speak and we’re like, what, I don’t know, I’m just cranky. It’s just how I am or, you know, whatever that is. And if we can pull ourselves out of it, we’re like, oh, this is how I should feel. It’s an important topic. We don’t want to spend too much time circling the topic either because if we are feeling that way for feeling a bit of burnout, or we want to avoid burnout, because as Bian said, it’s when you have this stress, and all this stuff happened, but you don’t manage it properly. We’re gonna give you some information, some of the medical, some of it, not medical advice, but from, you know, medical resources. Some of it is just from our own experiences, especially me as a home inspector. I’ve been a single inspector and a multi-inspector firm, and some of these practical suggestions could really help us out.

Beon D: Yeah, I think that’s going to be very valuable because a lot of the resources you may find on burnout and managing stress they from a point of view of an employee, or, you know, keeping your employees, you know, happily create a healthy working environment. But, you know, as a home inspector, by its very nature, you’re normally the owner of your own business as well. So you, you’re creating the environment, you’re setting the pace, so you want to make sure that that you’re doing that for yourself so that you’re managing your stress well.

Ian R: Yeah, so let’s kind of talk about some things that we can do, in a practical sense without getting into psychology or any of that stuff. But just some practical things that we can do to relieve some of the burden and some of the burnout. One thing that I really thought about was Pavlov’s dog, you remember him Beon?

Beon D: I do not.

Ian R: Well, so this guy did an experiment where he would ring a bell, and then he would feed the dog. So then ring the bell and feed that, ironically, in training a puppy right now to go outside when it needs to go to the bathroom. We trained under the ring of a bell. So if we accidentally ring the bell, he walks over to the door, and he has to go to the bathroom but it’s Pavlov’s dog. So what happened was he would ring the bell, knock, give the dog food after time, and the dog would still salivate and get hungry even if he had just eaten. So I think about that with our phone ringing, a text message going off, or an email popping in. Sometimes we get on this thing where I have to answer all of my emails and text messages and everything right away. I’m the biggest culprit of that. If you text me, people are always saying, Oh, my goodness, Aren’t you busy? But you texted me right back. So I’m a huge culprit of that. The problem is, once you start getting stressed, do you feel it? When does the phone ring? I was talking to him specter recently. He goes, it’s like it just wells up in my chest when I hear the phone dinging as I’m driving because we have trained ourselves like Pavlov. To feel that stress when our phone goes off. It could just be something benign, our cousin calling us saying, Hey, buddy, what’s going on? But instead, we felt that level of our adrenaline go up adrenal glands producing stress hormones because that’s what we’ve trained ourselves to do. So one practical thing that I have tried to force myself to do and I noticed a distinct change in my stress levels, is to purposely ignore the dang on my phone, or just turn it off completely. I’ll have set times Okay. I’ll check my phone every 30 minutes. I don’t want to miss anything, but I don’t have a ding or a buzz or anything happening. The only one that I can get through his important family members. That’s one way that we can kind of not have that little bit of stress. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of talk about that online or just turn off your phone completely. But you can just turn off the notifications, and so get some of the same benefits. We can also do it, there’s a guy called Tim Ferriss, I’m not a huge fan of him, but he talks about the four-hour workweek. One of the things he recommends is to enter all your emails and text messages within three one-hour periods during the day. It’s actually pretty effective. It trains people that you’re not going to respond within three seconds. Of course, you want to let family get through quickly, you know, your wife, your kids, your husband, you know, what, whoever know we’re working with, but at the same time, can we just set aside here’s the three hours that I enter emails instead of being on call 24/7.

Beon D: It’s very good advice. I recently tried this because I took a long time to get into the whole era of having a smartwatch you know, I always had a running watch because I’d like to keep track of my stats when I run. I switched over to a smartwatch, now it’s integrated with my phone and you know, all the rest and all excited about this integration but you know, how stressed out I became because now all these notifications, I test right to my wrist, and anytime I got an email or a message or anything my anywhere I am, you know, and I started watching, noticing it when I was sitting at dunk for lunch, you know, so I work from home. So we tried to have lunch together as a family real quick in the middle of the day. I’m sitting there having my quick lunch. I’m breaking away now with the family. I’m glancing down at my watch every two minutes, you know, looking down and eventually, I can see my wife was like, here’s everything, okay? I’m like, Yeah, everything’s fine but I was not feeling fine. And it was just like notifications for like, hey, remember to do this week. And you know, Hey, how’s it going? haven’t talked to you in a while but I was getting so stressed out just because of the notifications. So I eventually did what you suggest there, I turned off the notifications. Now when I’m at my desk, I will review all the emails or whatever, because they’re not going to go anywhere, that they’re right there. And you could attend to them. I really can recommend it as a way of relieving some stress.

Ian R: Yeah. It’s funny because sometimes I worry personally, what if I miss something? What if somebody needs something and they need it now? What if it’s an emergency? So I started to count the times that if I didn’t get to that right away, something big would happen. Over the past 20 years, it might have been once or twice. Then I went back and thought about them, I’m like that I really do anything by answering that email or that phone call right away anyways, it definitely the benefits outweigh the risk of missing that one phone call. It kind of trains your agents and clients to know Hey, I’m not gonna call you back right away but now that does lead us to the fact that sometimes if we’re building a business, we can’t miss that phone call. If we don’t answer the phone, we don’t get that lead. This leads me to guys who will always argue with me on this. That’s fine. Get someone else to answer your phones. I personally prefer a call center because you hire a person you train them, they leave now yet to hire a new person train them, they leave with a call center, they answer the phones, they follow leads. It just works out a lot better. I use America’s call center. I think they do a great job. But I tell you when I was still a single Inspector, I switched to using the call center. Oh my goodness, I would wake up in the morning, they’d answer my phone calls. It would always give people one level away from me. So if you really needed to get to me, you had to leave a message with America’s call center. They’d send me an email. Then I’d have to call you back. 80-90% of people didn’t, they’re like, oh, okay, we’ll just schedule or we’ll just, you know, ask our questions of the person there. Then after the inspection, people weren’t calling me and texting me and my personal phone as much anymore. It was a huge relief. I just remember the feeling. I just felt amazing. I’d go and do my inspection, stop and have a nice lunch and then go do my next inspection. There might be an email waiting for me when I got home that I had to answer that America’s call center couldn’t and my schedule is just filling up. It was beautiful. If you can get your grown son or daughter to answer the phones if you can hire a call center. If you want to go the secretary route, that’s fine too. Whatever it is, if you can get someone to answer your phones for you, and keep your personal number personal for immediate friends and family. Oh, that was one of the best decisions I ever made. my stress level went down by 100 points out of 100 points. It was a beautiful thing.

Beon D: I think a lot of us inherently just grow up and you’re taught to pursue a certain work ethic that you know is expected of you it’s baked into you. We also are got to be working so hard to be able to, you know, be successful. We do that, I mean, obviously, we’re also concerned about paying our bills and making sure we’re providing for our families and all that, but and I’m just asking, generally, how do we balance that drive because I think sometimes when we scale back, or even like maybe engaging a call center, having somebody else do that work, you know, and we’re sort of freed up a little bit. Sometimes that can make us feel like, Man, I’m, I’m not working hard enough. I’m having other people do my work for me. How does one get over that psychological hurdle?

Ian R: You know, it’s funny, right? Now, there’s a home inspector that emailed me just last night. He said the same thing. He goes, I feel like I’m just sitting around on my couch doing nothing. He’s like, but I have enough work. Actually, I’m doing pretty well. Everything’s working out. I’m like, why are you making work where there is none. If you can make it without doing that extra work? Do it. That sounds like an amazing life. Let’s step back for a moment and look at the hustle culture. So I’m on the pot calling the kettle black, the guy who owns three home inspection companies, you know, a marketing company and former contractor and me and Beon both do inspector toolbelt I’m the pot calling the kettle black, but the “A” type personality comes at a cost. Hustle culture is good because it means we work hard. Hard work is a beautiful thing but what’s the point of working hard if you don’t stop every once in a while and enjoy it? One thing I’ll say is, a lot of times we try to fix our burnout with a vacation. Well, I take a vacation every year I take two weeks off, that’s a band-aid on a bullet one because we’re not managing the stress, we’re taking a break from it and then we go right back into it. How many of us after a vacation, say I’m looking forward to going back into my stressful situation. We need to manage it throughout the year. There’s an inspector, I know he decided to take every Friday afternoon off. At first, I’m like, Man, Friday afternoons, those actually do really well. Those are popular time slots. He’s like, Nope, I’m gonna do it. That guy has been doing it for five years and is as happy as a clam. It’s just half a day. He misses one inspection a week and nobody barks at it. I gave up weekend inspections, because I’m like, You know what, I just need to be with my family on the weekend. Can you imagine having a three-day weekend for the rest of your life? That really makes you get through the week a little bit better. So if you can do it, do it. I mean, that’s a good way to try to manage our burnout throughout the year.

Beon D: I guess all of us will sort of maybe secretly have an idea of what would make things better for you, you know, what would make my life easier right now? Sometimes it may be a case of just organization or how we look at tasks that we need to accomplish. There’s a guy that I followed for a number of years, his name is David Allen and he’s quite famous for his GTD or getting things done mantra. Even though I do not sort of somebody that’s obsessed with, you know, getting your workflow onto a perfect system, there are a few points he makes that are very good. And one common mistake, he says he sees people doing, I need to do this job. Like say, I’m gonna just give an example. I got to build a deck on my house, but really, nobody just goes out and builds a deck, there’s a whole bunch of micro-tasks that need to take place for you to build the deck. You first have to spec it out, drop the plans, you have to, you know, do a materials takeoff, go and buy the materials. Once you have it delivered, you know the steps involved. So his recommendation is sometimes it’s a source of stress, when we have these big tasks, oh, I really got to do something about this, or I really got to do something about that. Just keeping it kind of hovering, there is a big task, it stresses us out, breaks it down into micro-tasks, and then determines which one is next. And then that one goes into your to-do list. So that I have to do this next, to take a chunk out of this task. And maybe looking at breaking bigger tasks up like that will make it feel like it’s more doable, because it’s not one single task that you need to accomplish or list of them, as opposed to just you know what he calls an amorphous blob of undue ability. You know, you have to break it down to actual things you can do.

Ian R: Yeah, that’s actually a really good point. I’ve always tried to do that with inspections. Because I used to get stressed when I first started in my early 20s. I’d be like, Man, I have this whole house to inspect this whole report to write. You know, what I did is I just said, Okay, I have the basement to inspect. Then I would just do that, and then I say okay, now I have an attic to inspect. I’d break it up into smaller tasks and it did help it helped relieve my stress about going about that inspection because I was only focusing on one thing instead of what I had ahead of me. So that’s good advice.

Beon D: You did mention therein that, you know, as a home inspector, you just by design are placed in a stressful situation, other people’s stressful situations. Is it possible? How have you found a way of being able to, I don’t know, insulate yourself, remove yourself or just beat the emotion of the situation where it doesn’t get to you?

Ian R: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. I’ve worked with a lot of agents over the years, and I’ve seen some that have been very reactionary to their clients being stressed out. They’ll do things uncharacteristically because their client stressing them out. I mean, that’s proven science, the chemicals that our bodies give off stress chemicals will affect the people around us and the way they’re talking the inflection in their voice, the look in their eyes, is that fight or flight feeling that gets projected onto you? A couple of things I try to, it’s easy to say, Oh, I’m going to compartmentalize don’t let their emotions affect you. It is it’s gonna happen. So you have to manage it. When it does. I try to lighten the mood a little bit. Not necessarily just for getting the joke in there. We’ve talked about my dad jokes, they’re terrible. But it breaks through the tension. It’s just as much for them as it is for me. Once I can get them to laugh a little bit, I noticed those emotions go down, even if they’re laughing at how stupid my dad joke is, it helps the situation I remember, I don’t know where this came from this it could have gone horribly wrong. But I was standing in this room and the lady buying the house. She’s standing and she goes, I can’t fit all of my stuff in here. I don’t know why I ever decided to downsize. So I sat on the couch next to her with the agent there. I’m like, Don’t worry, this is kind of like buying a pair of pants, two sizes too small, you’re going to have to force yourself to fit into him at that point. The room just dropped. I don’t know why it even came to my head. The agent was crying laughing so hard and I was apologizing. I’m like, I don’t know where that came from. She was just like, that was the best thing you possibly could have said, and literally not only the inspection, but the rest of the transaction went really well. It just brought a little bit of relief. So a little bit of humor can kind of relieve the tension. Also really work hard to be objective. Step back if we find ourselves calling out something that maybe we normally wouldn’t. Are we being objective? Or are we just feeding off the emotion of our buyer? Are we going to regret that later? Was it really a defect? Or on the reverse of things are people so nervous that you’re going to find something that was said I call that out? We might be feeding off of the emotions of the other people in the room. So step back and say, Okay, let’s take this from a completely emotionless setting because it’s not going to help our clients if we get emotionally involved with them. It’s a matter of managing when it happens instead of trying to avoid it all completely.

Beon D: You seem to own the copyright on a whole bunch of pants jokes.

Ian R: Do I have other pants jokes?

Beon D: Yeah, man. Your illustrations many times involve pants so it must be a subject near and dear to your heart.

Ian R: Apparently. Oh, you know what? I am remembering my pants illustrations now.

Beon D: Just a disclaimer to everybody else. You know, don’t step into the whole pants joke foray It’s a specialty and not everybody can pull it off. It’s well I guess maybe that’s not the best.

Ian R: Hang on, that’s my trademark inspector tool belt Home Inspection Software and pants manufacturer.

Beon D: And we just proved to you that laughter is a good form of stress relief. Or maybe you just got your gotcha palm on your face and like oh boy.

Ian R: Oh man, I’m gonna have to come up with more pants jokes, that’s gonna be a recurring theme.

Beon D: Okay, I’m gonna move on. What you were saying about the buyers and expectations. It does show you what effect people have on you. You know people can stress us out. But people can also make us feel better. That was some of the advice that I ran into is really concentrate on the circle of people that you are moving in. When it comes to your clients, you don’t get to pick and choose your clients you don’t know what sort of people they are you arrive on-site and you kind of just you know, play the hand that you’ve been dealt but when it comes to your private life, and you know the friends that you seek, make time to surround yourself with people that well are a building to you help you and you know. Sometimes it’s interesting, professionally, it helps to maybe have somebody to commiserate with even professionals when things do go wrong, I know, you, and I do that quite a bit. We call each other up. It’s like, I’m not asking for a fix. Just hear me out and we unload, you know, it’s very helpful.

 

Ian R: Yeah, you know, a lot of times we spend so much time marketing to agents, and going out to lunch with agents and doing all that stuff, go grab a couple of home inspectors. I hear a home inspector say, Oh, well, you know, these guys in my market this and that, and we don’t get together. You know, it was like that in my market. When I first started, I remember just feeling stressed. I’m like, am I the only one who just has to deal with, you know, a father. You know, this was years before Facebook groups and all this other stuff? You know, I didn’t know. So I’m sitting there. I’m like, the father-in-law that comes in, is in my face the home inspection? Am I the only one that has to deal with that? So I reached out to other home inspectors. You know what, it was interesting guys that I thought, Oh, well, they’re just jerks. And they’re not going to do this or that. They met me for lunch. We back each other up. One time I had a radon test to get lost and another guy had a radon monitor. He’s like, Oh, man, I got you. He went over and did it. Somebody needed me to fill in for an inspection. I went over and did it for him. All that stuff happens all the time. Just find a good circle of inspectors to talk with. And you know, Facebook groups are great but actually sitting down with a guy going, let me tell you about a doozy. Just hearing their stories too, kind of helps with the burnout. As you said, we commiserate with them. Like, here’s our pain. Oh, man, I feel Yeah, I can guarantee you every inspector out there. If we were to just lay out stories of inspections, they’d all shake their head and go, Oh, yeah, not been there. Because we have the same experiences a lot of time.

Beon D: Yeah, I can only imagine, you know, just the other day, I walked up to a place and somebody else is going in at the same time I was. So you know, I held the door back for him. And it’s like, Hey, how’s it going? Never met this person in my life before. He just barked back in a terrible, you know, and he walked in, and you know, we were going to the same place. So I kind of stood back and he didn’t even like, oh, how are you? Thank you or whatever. He just started looking into somebody about something, you know, I mean, okay, maybe the guy was just having a bad day. I guess some guys are just kind of grumpy like that all the time. If you’re gonna be like that, maybe just give it a rethink. Again, just give it giving a thought to who you surrounding yourself with because maybe their friends you’ve had for a long time, but you have to admit, man, after I have spent some time with that guy, I just, I just don’t feel good. You know, if you are at a point where you’re a little more stressed out, pay attention to those feelings because you could do yourself a favor by just limiting and being selective a little bit.

Ian R: Yeah, it helps to have a support group. A couple of other practical things that you can do, in addition to choosing the right friends and who you spend your time with exercise, and a healthy diet. I hate it when you watch the commercial or your doctor says, Oh, just eat healthily and exercise. Okay, that’s like the blanket statement that you could throw on the situation. It really does help if we have a healthy lifestyle and that’s hard to do as an inspector. If we’re doing a few inspections a day, it’s easier to grab some McDonald’s on the way through in the drive-thru. Sit in our car for one hour and a half drive to inspection hour and a half back. Yeah, we walk around the house, but we’re doing things that tweak our back and, you know, it’s not really an aerobic exercise, it’s anaerobic. It’s not conducive to a healthy lifestyle. I remember driving around trying to find places where I could eat garbage. When I didn’t pack my lunch, it was hard. It’s easier just to grab a slice of pizza on the run. A couple of things that I tried to do that has always helped me and always improve my mood was I’d get up earlier, and exercise first thing, get it right out of the way. I don’t know how true this is or not but they say when you’re releasing the serotonin and all that stuff from exercising, it’s better to do it in the morning because now you have that little bit of a high helping you through your day and it did it helped me again, I don’t know if that’s true or not. In a healthy diet, we need to find out what’s healthy for us. You know, are we going to eat a handful of almonds and some granola, a bowl of oatmeal, and some blueberries, or we’re gonna have a big plate of bacon and eggs. Whatever works for you find what makes you feel good throughout the day and try to skip the junk food.

Beon D: That’s good advice. When it comes to diet. I think I do pretty well. My wife is very health conscious and she makes sure as a family that whatever we order into our home is good and healthy. You know, I tried to do the same when it comes to exercise though. Again, my wife is a very good example. I am a terrible example and you know that Ian because you’re like you’re an exercise guy. Sometimes when I’m like, Oh man, I really just don’t feel so good. You’re like, Hey, man, you just got to exercise, go for a run or do something. My wife, she’s actually a certified personal trainer. She told me many times, there are two types of people when it comes to exercise intrinsically motivated. In other words, you can motivate yourself, you get excited about exercise, you go out there you do it, you have an Ian, or you’re extrinsically motivated, you need something else outward input to make you feel like exercising and getting into doing something physical and exercising. That was another, bringing back David Allen, he had a good suggestion, he used to trick himself into getting excited about exercising. So if he wants to hit the gym, he would take his gym bag with having it all packed, and keep it you know, if you’re traveling in your truck, keep it on the seat next to you all day you staring at it, you’re ready to go, you get it because most of us, if you actually make it to the gym, and you’re there, you get swept up in the environment of hey, yeah, everybody’s here to work out and I do my workout and I go home, but whatever it has to do, even if it is tricking yourself, get a fitness watch. So you can see how your times are improving or whatever but do what you got to do. So you can get excited about exercising, and I’m going to look to apply some of those things in the upcoming weeks for sure.

Ian R: Well, and you know, it’s interesting you say that because a lot of us that are home inspectors are already type A personality that what I don’t know what your wife called it intrinsic? No.

Beon D: Yeah. Intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic.

Ian R: Okay, so intrinsic motivation, we are, generally speaking going to be that type as a home inspector. That’s what motivated us to start our own business, to inspect houses to share our knowledge. Use that and say, 20 minutes in the morning, you don’t have to be an animal in the gym. 20 minutes in the morning, can you go in, do some push-ups, do some setups, do some air squats, they call them? Just 20 minutes a day. You’ll feel it. It works really well. I was just reading an article about the connection between your mind and, your body when you’re exercising. They are using exercise to treat all sorts of mental illnesses more effectively than a lot of other medications. Obviously, medication is still needed for a lot of different things, but that was just a perspective of that article. It has helped me I’ve I’m way more capable of dealing with the burn when I’ve gotten a gym session in the morning.

Beon D: yeah, I can speak to that too. I, I start struggling with insomnia. If I’m not working out, I start having a real hard time falling asleep and staying asleep. And when I do, I’m just physically tired enough that I do sleep. So it’s a huge advantage in that way. I must admit one last point in you know, this may be something we all neglect. But I know you enjoy woodworking Ian, and you do woodworking for a very particular reason.

Ian R: Yeah, well, you know, I like to make things and me and my daughter, we just like to make things together. I’ll make anything. I mean, half the wooden furniture in my home I made. Every table, every chair, every bench, every chest, I look at it and go, I remember what was going on. It was a way for me to destress we’re just built to make things in my opinion. So pick something small, you know, I milled up some maple trees with a friend of mine. You know, nothing feels better than ripping a tree out of the woods. I like to say, I went out I murdered a tree, I chopped it up to pieces, and I sit on it now. There’s nothing like that feeling, you know. Then all the leftover pieces my daughter and I make charcuterie boards and cutting boards and we give them to people, I don’t have, like 80% of the stuff I’ve made because I give it away. Because I do it to relieve stress, make something cool and give some things to some friends. My daughter will burn their initials on a cutting board or cheese board or something like that or a table. It just feels good. Get a hobby, if that’s not your thing. Just have something to reduce stress. I also make wine. Not that the wine is gonna really, that’s a whole different podcast.

Beon D: Yeah, that was actually on my list for like things not to get into too much. You know, I guess making it as okay.

Ian R: Making it as fine. Yeah.

Beon D: It’s interesting. That’s one of the recommendations also is to, you know, get into creative activities like that. It’s so sad, you go over to a friend’s house, maybe somebody you don’t know really well. And you’ll walk in and you’ll see a guitar you know and you’ll be like, Oh, hey, who plays guitar? And somebody will reluctantly say, oh, yeah, I used to, you know, a long time ago or, you know, whatever it is, you see, as an artist bench with an easel set up and oh, who paints? Oh, I used to. A lot of people used to do a lot of stuff. Maybe we have to, and it’s things that brought us stress relief, and we enjoyed it. So maybe think of something that you have not done for a long time that brings you some enjoyment and see what you can do, it will help to ease your stress, somewhat.

Ian R: Yeah. it goes back to that old adage, run your business, don’t let your business run you. If you’re not doing the things that you enjoyed, think back to why you started to become a home inspector. Was it because of the freedom and the good pay so that you could spend time with your family? How do you spend less time with your family and stressed out when you do? Step back and say, Okay, how’s this really working? Going back to charging more. If you charge more for an inspection, and you do less inspections, and you have more free time, that sounds awesome, I’d rather make the same amount of money in less period of time and have more free time. So doing the calculations, if you charge $500 per inspection, the average national fee is 350 Charge 500 bucks. If you work four days a week, $1,000 a day, two inspections a day, four days a week, you just made $200,000, and that three day weekends all year. I mean, if you’re building a huge business, and that’s where you’re going, great, but step back and say, Do I need to do all of this right now? Especially if you have kids, Can I go and hang out with my kids? That’s the joy of being a business owner is to say, Nope, I’m not doing that I’m heading out, you know. So if you’re feeling the burn, step back and think about some of the suggestions we laid out here beyond had some great ones. Just some practical things like putting your phone down, and just addressing things afterward. You know, if we can do that, it’ll help us to deal with burnout a lot better. It’s managing it throughout the year, not just taking a vacation and trying to fix it that way.

Beon D: Yeah, it’s really not something that you can just, oh I got to take a day off. Something else can be frustrating when you take an unplanned day off. Sometimes you have to, but you haven’t planned anything. You know, I’m gonna take the day off tomorrow. Okay, now, what do we do, and you end up hanging around the house. You know, like, it’d be fun, but you know, plan time away, and it can be something constructive. I guess the bottom line in many ways is if you are feeling stressed for a prolonged period, and you start to suffer, don’t just suck it down. I just got to keep ongoing. Just stop for a second and regroup and give some of these things, some thought because you have to address them. If you don’t, it will continue to build and get worse. You got to kind of fix it at the source.

Ian R: Yeah, better is a live dog than a dead lion. So just step back, look at things if we’re feeling burnout. Don’t be ashamed. I’ve been there and I think a lot of people have been there that, to be honest, may not admit it. It’s something that can be managed and If we do, we’ll be better off for it.

Beon D: Good advice. Thanks, Ian, It was very helpful. I’m sure all the home inspectors listening are going to benefit from that.

Ian R: Awesome. Thank you for going over the subject with me, Beon.

Outro: On behalf of myself, Ian, and the entire ITB team, thank you for listening to this episode of inspector toolbelt talk. We also love hearing your feedback, so please drop us a line at [email protected].

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