Joanna Gaines says she and Chip lost sight of Magnolia’s purpose. 1 decision helped them find it again

Every founder is subject to burnout, even the founders of a massive lifestyle, retail, and media brand.

Joanna Gaines, co-founder of Magnolia, launched the brand alongside her husband, Chip, nearly 25 years ago. After gaining prominence for renovating houses on the HGTV show Fixer Upper, the two used their company to transform the city of Waco, Texas. They realized they needed to take a break.

On Monday, Gaines discussed how the couple took a three-month hiatus from their business on Hoda Kotb’s Joy 101 podcast. The 48-year-old reflected on her time building the brand and explained why they took the break to embrace the “power of pausing.”

“As far as Magnolia, we’ve been doing this for almost 25 years and we’ve never really stopped. And about three years ago, we stopped seeing vision,” she said on the podcast. “We stopped remembering like, ‘Why are we doing this?’”

The couple ultimately decided that taking a three-month break was the right step to regain sight of the message and intention behind their business. 

“I remember I was like, ‘OK, we’re going to take the summer off,’ which meant disappointing our team, disappointing a lot of things, to just up and leave. So it cost us something,” Gaines told Kotb. “But that three months was time for us to go, ‘We need a break. We need clarity. Why are we building this? What are we doing this for?’ And so that was three years ago.” 

What are some of the signs of burnout?

Allison Schultz, co-founder and coach at Reboot.io and author of The Art of Being Human at Work, told Inc. that the signs of burnout vary from person to person.

“Most folks, when stressed and overwhelmed, show up differently. If you’re overwhelmed, stressed to the max, feel out of touch with your purpose, or haven’t taken care of yourself in a long time, you’re not going to be able to meet the day (and the people you work with) the way you would show up on your best day,” Schultz told Inc.

Melody Wilding, an executive coach and the author of Trust Yourself: Stop Overthinking and Channel Your Emotions for Success at Work, agreed with Schultz, adding that another warning sign is when leaders start to work longer hours, “think about projects constantly, yet get less satisfaction from wins that once energized you.”

She told Inc. that people should look out for repetitive, rigid thought patterns, like: “I can’t stop or I’ll fall behind” or “Everything will fall apart if I step away.”

Jerry Colonna, co-founder and coach at Reboot.io, told Inc. that successful entrepreneurs often struggle to recognize burnout until they’re deep into it, because “so many of the behaviors that produce burnout are precisely the behaviors we reward in entrepreneurs.”

He explained, “We celebrate the founder who works harder, pushes through exhaustion, answers every email, carries everybody’s anxiety, and refuses to quit. We call that grit. Sometimes it is. But sometimes what looks like perseverance from the outside is fear on the inside: fear of disappointing people, fear of losing what we’ve built, fear that if we slow down everything will collapse.”

Paula Davis, founder and CEO of the Stress & Resilience Institute, told Inc. that taking a break can be a strategic decision.

“When you’re in multiple years of growth mode in your business, I think it’s good to take a step back to just recalibrate,” Davis said.

She added that “Joanna said she and Chip needed to reconnect with the why of their business and to assess/take stock of all they had done for the entire 25 years they had been building the business. The three dimensions of burnout are chronic exhaustion, cynicism, and feeling inefficacy—a why-bother-who-cares mentality.  When you start to feel those symptoms, it can take some time for them to reverse course. That’s why catching burnout early is so important.”

Colonna said that leaders can learn to choose to pause instead of pushing through—and that stopping is not the same as quitting. 

“A real pause creates enough distance for us to hear ourselves again. It allows us to distinguish between the needs of the business and the needs of our own frightened, ambitious, approval-seeking selves,” Colonna said. “It can reconnect us with the original intention beneath all the accumulated noise.”

—Lucia Auerbach

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com. 

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