🔥 I used to think burnout meant I wasn’t strong enough: That I had to hustle harder, prove myself, and ignore what my body was trying to tell me. Burnout didn’t start in corporate. It started with the belief that overworking was the price of admission.

I have since learned burnout isn’t a breakdown—it’s a breakthrough waiting to happen.

As Brené Brown says, “When we own our stories, we get to write the ending.” I finally chose to stop repeating the old script and write a better one—

One where resilience looks like curiosity, capacity, and clarity—not collapse.

In this post, I’ll share the three moments burnout hit hardest and, how each one gave me a chance to rewrite the story.

*If you’ve been reading along, you might remember some of these stories. If not, and you’d like to learn more, I invite you to check out my blog on openness: Click here

✅ Round One: Freshman year, I launched a research lab—something unheard of at the time. I thought: This will get me into grad school. Senior year, I was running the lab, waiting tables, applying to grad school, and grieving my grandfather. I carried it all like a badge of potential. The rejection letter came and then that night, I had my first panic attack. Yet, two weeks later—I was accepted into the Master’s program. I refused to shut down, I took on more to recalibrate and tried again. I was rewarded for initiating early, doing more than expected, and pushing through grief without pause.

🍬 System reward: Early achievement + high capacity = “promise” and acceptance.

🌀 Lesson: Take on more = get to the next level.

✨ New story: I’m allowed to ask. I’m allowed to adapt.

✅ Round Two: The pattern continued: Surprise, I launched a second research lab, took on more projects and worked. I believed: If I just do more, I’ll get into the PhD program.
Guess what, I still got rejected. On top of it all, a professor told me I should take a grammar class. What did I do, I internalized it: I can’t write. I don’t belong. Almost in rebellion, I kept writing, I applied for the Ph.D in Evaluation and when the Ph.D. program had no seats, I did not give up. I got into the Organizational Behavior Ph.D. program—the same semester.
In my mind, taking on more equaled the price of admission to the next level I wanted to achieve. I was rewarded for over-functioning and persistence, even when the outcome wasn’t guaranteed.

🍬System reward: Excessive workload = determination and potential.

🌀 Lesson: Over-functioning is rewarded— keep doing it.

✨ New story: There’s more than one path forward.

✅ Round Three: During my tenure in corporate, I logged 600 hours of overtime in one year—the kind of statistic that often gets praised as a badge of honor. For perspective, that’s twelve extra weeks of work on top of a full-time role. And yet, I wore it like armor, believing that if I just pushed harder, everything would fall into place. 🛡️ It didn’t. My health collapsed, and for the third time, I found myself staring at the reality I had been trying to outrun: This isn’t about me not being strong enough. This is about a system that rewards overextension and shoots the wounded. I was rewarded for sacrificing time, health, and personal boundaries in the name of performance.
🍬 System reward: Overextension = loyalty, leadership, and commitment.

🌀 Lesson: The system rewards collapse—then blames the collapsed.

✨ New story: The system was unsustainable. My value isn’t tied to depletion.

💡 From college to corporate, I kept stacking my plate. Each time, the system reinforced the belief that my worthiness was tied to output. I learned to take on more—not because it was sustainable, but because that’s what got recognized.

- Effort = Worth

- Overwork = Advancement.

- Hustling = Respect

Now I know: Preparation for success should never require self-abandonment.
No title, degree, or promotion is worth the cost of your health.

That was the turning point. I started asking a bigger question:
💡 What would leadership look like if it didn’t cost us our well-being?

The answer to that question became my life’s work.
I left corporate America because I realized I couldn’t fix the system from the inside. Instead, I built Leadership Archway™—a framework and philosophy designed to help leaders and organizations create systems that honor human capacity, not exploit it.

✔ If your metrics reward overwork → burnout will rise.
✔ If your culture prioritizes compliance over connection → engagement will suffer.
✔ If fairness, recognition, & values alignment are missing → trust erodes.

This is how I have rewritten my story: One where feedback doesn’t end me—it redirects me.
Because the stories we repeat become our realities and the moment, we get honest—that’s when we become the author again.

🌱 Burnout Defined

Burnout isn’t a vibe problem or a lack of personal resilience. It’s an occupational syndrome recognized by the World Health Organization:

“A syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, characterized by three dimensions: feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job or feelings of negativism or cynicism; and reduced professional efficacy.”

Clinically defined, burnout manifests as physical and emotional exhaustion, cognitive fatigue, and behavioral disengagement caused by prolonged stress. It is not a mental illness—but a signal of systemic and environmental failure.

Clinically burnout is:
✔ Physical & emotional exhaustion
✔ Cognitive fatigue
✔ Behavioral disengagement caused by prolonged stress

Again, I will reiterate: It’s not a mental illness—it’s a signal of systemic failure. ⚠️

📊 What the Research Shows

- Maslach & Leiter (2016): Six systemic drivers of burnout: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values alignment.
- Gallup (2022): Top causes include unfair treatment, unmanageable workload, lack of clarity, poor communication, and lack of support.
- McKinsey (2023): Executive burnout is driven by toxic cultures and lack of psychological safety.
- APA (2022): Burnout correlates with poor organizational design and emotional labor—not individual weakness.

Every data point confirms what many of us already know: Burnout isn’t about fragile people. It’s about fragile systems.

🧬 Burnout isn’t failure, 📉 it’s feedback, and your nervous system saying:

“I cannot keep pretending this pace and pressure are sustainable.”

When we ignore those signals, we activate chronic stress states:
⚠️ Cortisol spikes
⚠️ Decision fatigue
⚠️ Disengagement

Over time? These patterns lead to health risks + organizational instability.

Burnout isn’t weakness, it’s wisdom.
Leaders who treat it that way build cultures that last.

🧓 Let’s be clear: You cannot solve burnout with yoga classes or resilience webinars. 🧘
Why? Because burnout isn’t a personal problem. It’s an environmental one. 🌍

The old playbook: Fix the individual.
The new reality: Audit the system. ✅

✔ If your metrics reward overwork → burnout will rise.
✔ If your culture prioritizes compliance over connection → engagement will suffer.
✔ If fairness, recognition, & values alignment are missing → trust erodes.

The question is:
💡 Are we building organizations that people can survive—or thrive in?

📣 Burnout prevention isn’t just wellness programming: It’s leadership design.
It looks like:
- ✅ Auditing systemic mismatches before “resilience” plans
- ✅ Building capacity-aware workflows, not “always-on” norms
- ✅ Making psychological safety operational—not optional

✅ 5 Ways to Start Designing Against Burnout Tomorrow

1. 🔍 Audit the System Before the Person
Ask: “Where do structural mismatches exist—workload, control, recognition, fairness, values?”

2. ✅ Normalize Capacity Checks
Replace: “Can you take this on?” with “What would make this sustainable?”

3. 🧠 Integrate Biofeedback into Performance
Treat fatigue & decision delays as data, not deficiencies.

4. 💡 Reframe Burnout as a Leadership Issue
Before resilience programs, ask: “What systemic friction is creating depletion?”

5. 🧘 Embed Psychological Safety
Start meetings with: “What’s one thing we could do differently to make work more sustainable?”

📚 References

World Health Organization. (2019). Burnout: An Occupational Phenomenon.

American Psychological Association. (2022). Work and Well-being Survey.

Brown, B. (2015). Rising strong: How the ability to reset transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Spiegel & Grau.

Gallup. (2022). Employee Burnout: Causes and Cures.

Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P. (2016). Understanding the burnout experience.

McKinsey Health Institute. (2023). Burnout and Systemic Design Failure in the Workforce.