Beyond Burnout: Finding Joy in Life and Work

Episode Transcript

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

Hello, and welcome to the Daring to Succeed podcast. I’m your host, Julianna Yau Yorgan, and today I’m joined again by Stefanos Koutsoumpis, a men’s coach with a PhD in physics and a background in corporate leadership and mindfulness.

After years of outward success as a scientist and project manager, he knows firsthand what it’s like to feel stuck, disconnected, or like something’s missing.

Today, he helps high-achieving men. Move Beyond Burnout and Autopilot Living to Rediscover Purpose, Presence, and a Life that Actually Feels Good.

Welcome back to the podcast. Nice being back with you, Julianna.

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

There have been some months since last time.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

There have been, and I’m so excited to talk about this new direction you’re taking with your coaching, because the last time we recorded, you were helping project managers be more efficient.

And I was going through your website, and it had these big, bold letters that really hit me when I got to that part, which was, you’re successful.

Are you happy? And it just, it gives me, like, shivers every time I think about that question. So let’s get right into it and talk about why that’s such a profound question for men in their 30s right now.

Okay, yeah, yeah, nice question. You know, men…

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

It takes some years to build momentum. So around 30-something, you have your job, you maybe have a transition once already, and you get to some success already.

And this is the point where a lot of people break out of all the difficulties they were having all the other years, and now for the first time, they can see that, okay, they’re getting their money, they’re getting the stuff they wanted, they have the success they hoped when they were younger, and suddenly a lot of us found ourselves, you know, just hunting in the air.

It’s not enough. It’s you start requesting your values, like, okay, why I’m doing this? I thought that I would enjoy what I’m doing now, but I’m not.

So there’s something wrong with me. So this is something Very common, that happens to a lot of people. It happens to men and happens to women as well, but for men, it’s a bit more difficult to recognize when they take a path that it’s not entirely their own.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

Yeah, and we talked about this a little bit when we were chatting before we did the actual recording, and I find that it’s sometimes a little bit more difficult just with the way that culturally men and women are conditioned to interact and to behave, that it’s almost acceptable and even expected for women to talk to each other when they’re struggling, when there’s something that feels a little bit off, but we kind of know in common culture with men, you’re expected to kind of keep everything internally, not share as much.

What’s kind of your take on that, and what are you seeing with that with some of the men’s groups that you’re putting together right now?

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

Oh, you know, there is a social expectation for men, you know, to be stoic, to know what they want.

And, you know, even if you watch the characters from books and movies, they are those strong-willed people. They don’t speak a lot.

They always know it all. And, OK, if this is not the real world, we are confused. We don’t know what’s going on.

There are issues, and sometimes they can come up as mental issues. And you need a place to share. It’s very common, and I get that when I speak to my friends, that, OK, things are really, really bad at work, at the office, at life.

And we don’t share, or we say, OK, things are tough, but yeah, I’m hunting. And that’s not what is happening.

You need to let that to the above, you know, so people will hear you out. And you need that to do that for yourself.

Yeah.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

And and I find with my male friends as well, sometimes if they do share that there’s something difficult, like you said, it’ll be like, oh, but it’s OK.

I’m OK. Or they switch right to problem solving without exploring that that challenge, like whatever is kind of giving them that that question mark in their life.

Do you find that as well? Or or like how have some of these conversations been going with you?

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

You know, a friend, he lives in Athens, he lives in Netherlands and he came up in a group chat to have among some other school friends and he said, OK, guys, I’m out of work now.

I’m in burnout. I’m he just made an announcement that OK, things are fine. My girlfriend is pregnant now and I’m in burnout.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

So. Oh! learn!

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

And this is how he shared, which at that time, you know, I felt a chillings in my spine because it was, I know how hard it can be for someone to stop and say, okay, I’m not feeling good enough to do anything now.

And he didn’t know how to share. It took him a long time, not to only, you know, he didn’t catch it in advance.

He couldn’t tell in advance, but okay, guys, I’m not doing well for the last three years. It’s been a big period.

He didn’t have any clues, actually, until things happened to him, and they were physical. So things had to be physical for him to understand that there are some emotions that won’t let him keep with his life, actually.

It’s saddening, you know, it’s very saddening if you think about it. Yeah, and I feel like there’s some culture.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

There’s that feeling those emotions, especially with something like work, is not necessarily allowed, and then you add that layer of masculinity on top, and it’s even more so, right, where maybe in your personal life, you’re allowed to feel happy emotions and share those.

But, I don’t know, it’s just so hard because we spend so much time in our careers building towards, like you said, all these goals of success, and then we reach them.

And, like you mentioned, whether you’re a man or a woman, there’s oftentimes a point where you reach those goals, and there’s still something missing.

You know, men are very, very goal-oriented.

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

So, this is something that’s good about men. It’s a healthy part of men. And when you’re young, you’re told…

So tricky, your goal is to grow up, to make a career, to be important, and no one is telling you that your goal as a man is to be happy as a person.

Maybe you need to be a good father, but not a happy father. Maybe you need to be, you know, wealthy, but you don’t have to be feeling good about yourself.

No one told you that this should be a part of the question you have to solve for your life.

So we never, never take this as something important in what we do, in the decisions we take. And we might think that, you know, my work life is something separate from how I feel.

But no, you know, it’s a whole system. And as you said, we’re spending so much time at work, that we should enjoy it.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

Yeah, and I remember the last time we spoke, you were… You’re really focused on helping project managers be more efficient so that they’re not working as much, so that they can actually enjoy their life.

What made you, or what was the moment that you realized that you needed to kind of shift off of that into what you’re doing now?

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

You know, I still have some part of my work in corporate, and I still speak with people from the corporate.

What I think that was missing there when I was speaking, you know, in a corporate environment, it was very hard to give the message that, okay, your lives are important, when you are gone, what you are leaving behind, some part of that should be, you know, you’ve been happy, and people were very reluctant to hear it in a work environment.

Maybe they don’t believe it. Maybe, you know, someone from HR called me and told me to say some nice things.

They don’t believe that what they’re hearing, but they are more open to listen to that message on their private time.

So it was easier to address what they believe is more important for the people during their leisure. And, you know, people will come to a podcast that I do or to some videos that I do in their free time.

So it’s easier, you know, you cast them off the hook.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

Yeah, it’s so interesting because some of the work I’m doing now is kind of around trying to figure out why is it that even though we’re spending so much time at work, even though some of us even have identities that are strongly tied to our work, our careers, our professional life, that

Somehow, even the idea of being happy at work is just not allowed. But now that you’ve shifted things more to having these conversations in their personal life, do you find that work comes back into the conversation when you’re talking to your clients about finding happiness and being happier in their lives in general?

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

You know, work is always a big part of the conversation, because most of us need the work to stay alive, and we also have things to offer.

And people, you know, what I find is that people are not lazy, people want to do things. But there’s a lot of friction when we’re doing things that we don’t enjoy.

So if you are stuck in a career or a role that you don’t enjoy, you might, you might, you know, there is this new…

Who trained work, work that people are passively stopping work, stop working.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

I think it was called quiet quitting. Quiet quitting. Yeah, exactly.

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

So I’ve seen a lot of people who do that. So always the work that we’re doing in our career is a big part of the discussion.

Something very sad is that a lot of people who feel very frustrated when they are at the top of their stress, they might say things like, okay, I will give up.

I’ll go to a Greek island and be a bartender. I give up and get some seaps and, you know, I become a seaper.

And what I’m telling to people is that, okay, before you do that, let’s reconsider a bit. You started the career.

Apparently, there were some parts of that. That you liked when you started, okay, let’s go back, see what is going on there, and fix your day, because I don’t believe that, you know, 100% of the work life of someone is bad, but maybe there are some parts that stuck out, and they’re, you know, really the nails in their skin.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

Yeah, and I mean, that’s oftentimes the default is, oh, I’m so unhappy, I’ll just leave this one big part of my life.

I think it’s why lotteries are always still so popular, because people dream of having all this money and not needing to work, but quitting our job is not always an option for everyone.

I know that’s odd coming from me because I did leave corporate, but I think the situation’s not very normal, but for most people.

Who, whether they’re not ready to quit or they’re just kind of saying that daydream, are there any tools or resources that you have for them who, you know, they’re unhappy with their career or some part of their life and quitting is either not an option or they know it’s the wrong option?

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

You know, I was trying to think of some quick ways, the first aid that someone should have when he doesn’t feel that happy or when he feels like he has to quit now.

And what I ended up doing, I created a small guide with five tools that someone can use to change his day now.

And they are focused a lot, you know, on habits and on the way we think because a big part of what makes us struggle and what is making us stressed.

It’s the way that we either, you know, the way we build the agenda in our day or the way our perspectives in things.

And there are some minor tweaks we can really go and do there and they will give us some space in order to think the bigger picture.

Maybe the correct solution for someone will be okay to switch careers, but you don’t want to do this in a rush.

You want to take some time and really think, because if you do it in a rush, it’s like playing in a lottery.

Maybe in a couple of years you’ll have to go through that again.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

Yeah, and the way you’re talking about it, it does seem like the work you’re doing is consistent with, like, the last time we talked.

And to me, I see this as almost like the next evolution of what you’re trying to do with your clients and helping them with the happiness where it’s…

Started with that focus of, okay, this is very like project management of you to diagnose the problem and be like, okay, well, it seems like one of the big pop challenges is the way we structure the day, the way we think about life in general.

And you’re still using those same tools, it sounds like, with your clients. It’s just that the conversation is a little bit different about the purpose, where it’s less about the work and more about life in general, which is so beautiful.

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

You know, always the discussion comes back to emotions, how you can recognize how you feel and how to use it as a tool.

You know, my background is very practical, you know, I was a problem solver, I was doing physics. So this is my approach to everything.

We are trying to understand what is going on and then we’re really practical in the solutions. So there are a lot of tools someone can use and, you know, tools are free.

Anyone can find any tool online. But in order to find what really bothers you, you need to come into connection with your feelings.

You know, do I like waking up like this? Do I like speaking to that colleague? Or when I’m my most productive through the day?

These are things we pick up, we work with. They can make a big, big difference in how you perceive life after all.

It really does.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

And I think, I mean, we could talk forever about the importance of emotions. And I’m curious about if there’s so much here to unravel and in terms of like feeling those emotions, really looking at our lives and what makes us happy and what does.

And for someone who’s listening, and we’ll come back to the tools in a second, but like, is there something that you can direct people to to help them kind of connect with their emotions a little bit?

And or even just to, how do I say this, to be comfortable with accepting that there are emotions even?

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

Accepting that there are emotions. No, there are a lot of great resources. My favorite book, if someone would want to do that, is, you know, from Goldman, The Emotional Intelligence, which is the basic book that will help you understand that, okay, we are more than just a thinking machine.

And there, what we have found is that when we cannot access our emotions. We cannot take any kind of meaningful decision.

People who have been, there were very bad experiments in the 1800s, people who were lobotomized, they couldn’t decide anything.

I mean, they couldn’t decide if they want to sit or stand up. And this is something I’m trying to tell people that once you recognize how you feel about any given choice, I mean, why move to Dublin or move to London?

What will help you decide? Because if you make a SWOT analysis, this won’t help. Maybe you will gravitate to what you already want in the first place, but it doesn’t really help.

And for me, one of the tools that really, really helped me, it was mindfulness, mindfulness meditation, because it gave me the space to sit and reflect and see.

There are things that come up that I, they were there already, but I never recognized. You know, in my guide, this is one of the things I, you know, people can find it on my website.

It’s very easy. And I have a link in there embedded for a five-minute meditation where you can just hit play, sit there.

And, you know, and magic happens. Magic happens, actually, when you sit in a quiet room and do nothing. Things will come up that you wouldn’t expect.

And this is, you know, part of the reason why we can’t do that. We can’t sit down in a room for five minutes and nothing.

We always, you know, have to speak to someone. We have to do something. We have to watch something. Because the noise in our head and, you know, the pressure from emotions and things we want to do or that we can’t do.

It’s so much that we can’t. But this is where the beauty of that is, that once you sit with your emotions, once you sit with your demons, and you get to understand them, and you get to take some educated decisions for your life.

I got chills while you were talking about that.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

And I agree with you. It’s so hard for us now to sit with ourselves in silence. No screens, no doing things.

So I’m really glad you included that meditation in your guide, because I think that will really help, especially for people who, like, I went through a meditation journey a little while ago, and it was really hard just to sit there.

But I found guided meditations were a little bit more helpful, because it helped kind of focus the silence, if that makes any sense, to kind of put something around all that silence, so I wasn’t just kind of there.

Because for me, Yeah, at least it’s really hard to sit still, even though I don’t necessarily need to have noise and conversation all the time.

It’s still, I think because of the way the world is right now, we’re so bombarded with things and do things and watch this and listen to this and read this, that it can be hard really at the beginning to just sit there and be mindful.

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

Yeah, but you know, there is the joy of that, that once you learn how to do it, you can incorporate it in what you do.

So when you write mail or when you speak to a person, you want to be focused there. You don’t want your mind to wander in your shopping list or your next discussion.

And you know, you help people with leadership when there’s a leader speaking. To his team, he wants his ears to be wide open to take even the slightest nuances in their voices and their looks.

You have to be present to see those things. And you have to be present in order to move people.

Yeah, absolutely.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

I think that mindfulness, that total, complete presence in the moment is definitely something that we all need to work towards a little bit more.

So as we’re kind of wrapping up, for people who are out there listening, and especially for our male listeners who might be curious about how they can work with you or access your resources, is there anything that you want them to take?

Away from all of the things we’ve talked about today. Is there just one thing that you’d love them to walk away from this episode with?

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

Okay, I have some comments, you know, about the men’s group that I run. I speak to a lot of men lately, and I put them, you know, in group discussions where we can share.

And what we have found there is that just the act of speaking your mind and telling what is bothering you is enough to give yourself perspective.

You don’t need someone else to tell you what to do. Just by saying it aloud to someone is enough.

And so people can do that. And if you need some extra accountability, I know that it can be hard for someone to do on his own, but if he needs some accountability,

And he might be, you know, helped by having some guidance, then I would be happy to speak with whoever needs that and see if we have something that works out for him, especially.

Yeah, that’s so amazing.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

And for those people who are ready to reach out to you, where can they find you? I’m on Instagram.

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

My channel is Mindful Life Coach. And my website, these are the two places where I hang out. In my website, you can find also my free guide with five ways to be happy every day before quitting your job.

And some people might really, really need some ideas on that. Yeah, that’s great.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

Feel free. I’ll be sure to include all those links in the show notes so people can find you. Well, thank you so much for coming back on the podcast.

It’s always lovely speaking with you. Thoughts for our listeners before we close off?

 Stefanos Koutsoumpis:

You know, I have a quote that the ultimate currency is human happiness. So you can take that as part of your values, you know, keep it in your heart.

Oh, so beautiful.

Julianna Yau Yorgan:

Well, thank you again. And thanks to our listeners. We hope you found this helpful and I will see you next time.