We just had another amazing spotlight with Larry Burton - winner of one of my monthly challenges.
Larry helps people with their nervous system and energy. He spent the last 20 years developing something he calls the Pondera Process, which he describes as empowered self-help. He runs the Substack Empowered Self-Help. He’s published two books. He does one-on-one coaching with the kind of guarantee most coaches won’t make:
Everyone who works with me gets results, otherwise they get their money back.
Here’s the question that reshaped how I think about creator burnout.
Most creators think burnout is a time problem.
“I don’t have enough time for Substack.”
“I can’t fit the posts in.”
“Life is too busy.”
Larry says this is wrong.
Think of your energy as being a well,” he said. “If you’re drawing buckets of water out of that well, it gets low. But we think that we need to do it through willpower, so we then push ourselves when the well is getting low. And we’re not learning how to refill that well.
The problem is that most creators are drawing from a well they never refill.
What I didn’t know about Larry
Now, Larry mentioned something on the call that I think gives this whole conversation a different angle.
About a year ago, he had a stroke.
He didn’t make a big deal of it. He just said it in passing, you know, like it was context. He was talking about what he’s learned recently, and he mentioned he had read a piece during the recovery period, and the piece reframed something for him that he’d been getting wrong for years.
Here’s what he said. “It’s not looking at how much you haven’t done or how much there is still to do, but rather realizing that you’ve taken the next step.”
I loved that so much.
Because here’s the thing. Most of us measure the gap.
The gap between where we are and where we want to be.
The gap between our subscriber count and the one we envy.
The gap between the posts we’ve written and the ones still sitting in our drafts folder.
And that gap can be infinite.
But Larry’s reframe is actually really simple.
You don’t measure the gap. You measure the step.
Did you take a step today? That’s it. That’s the entire question.
What Larry does differently as a creator
So one thing that was really interesting to me is that Larry hasn’t turned on his paid tier yet.
Now, you know me, I’m the person who says turn on paid immediately.
But Larry’s reasoning is actually really good, so I want to share it.
He said he’s not going to charge for something until he can really deliver on it. “I don’t want to overpromise and underdeliver,” those were his actual words.
And instead of rushing to monetize, he’s been building free resources, basically, around every single stumbling point he’s noticed in his coaching work.
He has one of the biggest collections of free tools I’ve seen on Substack.
A safe-space visualization. A “loving light” connection practice. A thing he calls the belief tree, where you walk from a behavior you don’t like, back to the emotion underneath, back to the belief that’s generating the emotion, back to the memory where the belief was formed.
Each tool is small. Each one answers a specific need. All of them are free.
How Larry uses AI
“I don’t give away my creativity. I don’t give away my brain. I don’t take what it tells me just at face value. It’s just the same way I used a copy editor.”
Before AI, Larry worked with a human book editor on his first books. The relationship was collaborative. He wrote the draft, she gave feedback, he revised. The process was his. The editorial support was hers.
And when AI came along, he just applied the same pattern. The output is still his. The AI is just the editor.
Most Substack creators deal with AI in one of two directions. Either they refuse it completely and fall behind anyone who uses the right way, or they outsource their thinking to it and lose their voice. Larry’s approach is actually much like mine - use the tool. Don’t become the tool.
Watch on YouTube:
So that’s Larry
If there’s just ONE takeaway from this spotlight, it’s really just the energy question.
Because most of us, when we feel stuck on Substack, we default to the time problem. I don’t have time. I’m too busy. Life is in the way. And sometimes, yes, that’s true. But often, actually, I think more often than we admit, the problem is not time. The problem is that we’re drawing from a well we’ve never figured out how to refill.
If you feel that way right now, Larry’s work is the right place to look. He’s been studying this specific thing for 20 years. He has free tools for every stumbling point. His whole Substack is called Empowered Self-Help because of that very same reason: energy.
Now go subscribe to Larry’s Substack, Empowered Self-Help. It’s free with full access to his resources. And if the energy framing lands for you, his two books go much deeper(affiliate links):
Self-Help 2.0 (the first book, where he lays out the thesis that traditional self-help is incomplete without the energy dimension)
Empowered Self-Help (the newer book, which turns the framework into something readers can actually practice on themselves)
Yana
P.S. Larry also credited Melody Beattie’s work on codependency as the “light bulb moment” that started his whole journey into energy psychology, back when he was first processing his divorce and his history as an adult child of an alcoholic.
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