My garden preached a word to me this morning!

If you’re familiar with my PURPOSESCAPING philosophy, you know I talk about how you need to understand what season you’re in so you know what you need to watch out for during that season.

When you’re embarking on something new and are in the spring planting season, you must treat yourself, your ideas, your health, your new relationship - whatever it is - tenderly.

New seedlings are delicate and can break under the weight of a heavy spade. I’ve taken to digging up and transplanting my garden seedlings with a plastic spoon. That seems to work well and I can move almost surgically to protect their fragile stems and roots.

I’ve found that spring is my favorite season metaphorically - I love the new beginnings. Where I struggle personally is summer, when you have to dig in and guard the growth from whatever has taken root.

I’ve observed summer as a season for ongoing maintenance, which has not traditionally been my strength. But it’s also the season when you have to be on guard. You have to protect new growth from pests and weeds because negative things are also attracted to good growth. (Apply this concept to when you begin growing in your career and attracting attention and recognition; you also attract jealousy, etc.)

Last night a strong thunderstorm came through. This was the first of the season and the first time I’ve had my vertical garden to the point where so many of my plants are growing and thriving and even producing fruit.

The wind blew ferociously and I watched from the window as my collards flapped. I just knew they were going to snap right off in the wind and blow away.

I rolled my vertical garden into what I thought was a safer spot closer to the house. I locked the wheels, said a prayer, went back inside and waited.

The storm raged briefly, and tossed a lawn chair from its spot. A potted plant toppled over. The wind scattered debris across the yard.

And then it was over. It was too dark to go out and assess, so I decided to wait until morning.

This morning during my garden check I noticed that for the most part, the plants were fine! Relieved I said another prayer of thanks.

But then I noticed that one of my two tomato plants - which I started from seed back in March - was leaning.

This is the largest plant in the vertical garden, and it has thrived under my care. Its stalks have thickened and it’s preparing to flower and fruit. I am extraordinarily proud of how I’ve cultivated this plant, and I am truly vested in its success.

As I investigated the leaning, I noticed one of the thicker stalks badly bent from the storm. I’m hoping it will recover, but I may lose a part of the plant.

I immediately ordered a plant support to give it a bit more help as it continues to grow bigger and climb higher.

That’s when it hit me.

Back to PURPOSESCAPING.

As a part of the framework, while I have accounted for pests and weeds and even drought in summer, I don’t think I ever thought about the threat of summer storms.

When what you’ve planted has taken root and it’s growing well, it may need even more support to account for all that it is now carrying so that it doesn’t snap when a storm comes through.

The June tomato plant is not the March tomato plant. The June tomato plant is more vulnerable BECAUSE of its growth, and it needs more support to reach its full potential.

I say the garden is preaching to me because I feel I too am in a major summer growth season.

I am carrying more and growing rapidly on my way to an inevitable harvest. As such, I need to call in more support to help me weather my own inevitable storms.

I need more community and a stronger team to hold me up and help me reach my full potential.

What about you?

How well do you navigate summer growth?

I love a good spring planting, but summer is my greatest challenge and my greatest personal teacher.

I’m so grateful to the garden for sharing its wisdom with me.

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Are you standing tall in your own summer growth season?

If you are carrying more, growing rapidly, and navigating the inevitable storms that come with higher levels of visibility and success, you cannot do it alone. The summer growth version of you needs more support than the spring planting version did to reach your full potential.

In my PURPOSESCAPING Coaching Intensive, we dig deep into your past seasons and current season, identify where you are vulnerable to snapping under pressure, and put the structures in place to protect your growth. You’ve done the hard work of planting; now let’s get you to a harvest season by building the scaffolding you need to thrive.

Book your discovery call to see if a PURPOSESCAPING Coaching Intensive is right for you.

Share THE Rest REVOLUTION

May is Mental Health Month and all month long, I’ve been publishing real burnout stories from high-achieving women who chose themselves anyway. This is the final interview in the series.

If you missed the previous interviews in this series, check them out here:

Jeni Slone is a healthcare marketing strategist who spent 15 years translating complex clinical ideas for other people while quietly struggling to understand her own mind. When her children were diagnosed with autism and ADHD, she began recognizing the same patterns in herself. Her own ADHD diagnosis finally made the whole story make sense.

Fun fact - Jeni and I go waaaaaaay back. To childhood, when our high-achieving days began. We met in elementary school and would walk part of the way home together. Then we both switched over to the magnet school system and matriculated through the same middle and high schools (Meigs Magnet and Hume Fogg Academic) in Nashville, Tennessee!

I’m grateful to Jeni for closing this series. May is Mental Health Month, and all month long, I’m publishing real burnout stories from high-achieving women who chose themselves anyway. This series is free to read and share.

Without further delay, here’s my conversation with Jeni Slone.

The Realigning Interview No. 6 - From a Lifetime of Adapting to Finally Understanding Why with Jeni Slone

Amanda: Before you hit your wall, how did you define success? What did your daily life look like, and what were the hand-me-down beliefs (about hard work or productivity) that were driving you?

Jeni: I grew up with an educated single mom who always told me that doing well in school was the key to success. As an only child, I put a lot of pressure on myself to succeed, to make money, to “do well,” to build a life that felt secure. In the back of my head I think I thought I’d be taking care of my mom for the rest of my life - maybe it’s my Hispanic culture or just seeing my mom as an only mom, but I just assumed I’d be working full-time for the rest of my life.

For a long time, success looked like having it all: a strong career, a family, friendships, hobbies… and somehow doing all of it at once. My daily life was full—almost too full. I was constantly juggling and overextending myself.

Over the last 15 years working in healthcare, I started to see that success isn’t just what you know—it’s also who you know. But there’s a third layer that no one really talks about: the unspoken rules. The relationship dynamics, the internal politics, the way decisions actually get made. And I think for people who are neurodiverse, those things aren’t always obvious. You can be doing everything “right” on paper and still feel like you’re missing something you can’t quite name.

Early on, I thought success meant something flashy—like living in a high-rise in New York with an elite job. But as I got older, got married, and had kids, that shifted. I still tied a lot of my value to work, but I started to realize success could also look like a happy family, present moments, and watching my kids grow.

The reality, though, was exhausting. For years, I was running on empty, working through lunch, taking care of everyone else, and collapsing into bed at night. I didn’t recognize it as burnout at the time, but looking back, it was clear.

Getting let go from my last role was a huge hit to my self-esteem, but it also opened a door. It caused me to consider getting tested for ADHD and autism, knowing both my kids had those diagnoses. I was diagnosed with ADHD, which explained so much of what I had struggled with for years. Now, I’m starting to reconnect with what I actually want, not just what I thought was expected of me.

Amanda: Burnout rarely happens overnight. Looking back, what were the early signals your body or spirit was sending you that you initially ignored?

Jeni: Looking back, the signs were everywhere.

I was constantly tired and not taking care of myself. I was saying yes to too much and then either doing everything halfway or feeling like I was failing at all of it. My memory felt off, I was making more mistakes, and I had less patience, especially with my family.

Physically, it showed up too as migraines, sitting too much, needing chiropractic care just to feel normal. Even years earlier, I had moments where my body was clearly overwhelmed, like getting so stressed I got physically sick and threw up, but I didn’t slow down. I just kept pushing through.

I also carried this belief that I had to “earn” rest or big life moments. For example, I felt like I had to put in my time with an employer before taking time off to have another child. Looking back, it’s wild how much pressure I put on myself.

Amanda: Was there a specific ADHD-related burnout breaking point - a moment when you realized you couldn’t keep going the way you were? What did that bottom look like for you?

Jeni: Yes, it was being let go from my last job.

It forced everything to stop. I spent three months applying to over 130 jobs, customizing every application, and barely hearing back. It was humbling and honestly pretty crushing.

Financially, we had to adjust, cutting back on things we were used to. One small but very real moment for me was driving through a car wash where I had a $20/month membership and had to ask the attendant to cancel my membership. It sounds silly, but it hit me hard. I had tied so much of my identity to income and stability.

That was rock bottom for me.

But it also created space. Space to reflect, to be with my kids, to notice things I had missed, like how much my daughter needed help with reading. And around that same time, getting my ADHD diagnosis gave me a completely new lens on my life.

It didn’t fix everything, but it helped me start asking better questions about what I actually want moving forward.

Amanda: As you began to recover, what was the hardest belief or habit to let go of?

Jeni: The hardest thing to let go of was the need for external validation.

I didn’t mind stepping away from the hustle, but letting go of needing recognition and approval was hard. For a while, I thought something was wrong with me, that maybe I just wasn’t as good at marketing as other people.

But over time, I realized my brain just works differently.

Now I’m starting to find value in myself outside of my job or title, which feels new, and honestly, really freeing.

Amanda: In my work, I talk about the seasons of purpose. What did your “winter” (your period of rest or incubation) look like? How did you give yourself permission to do nothing?

Jeni: I think I’m still in it.

I’m in a time of growth, reading, and learning. I’ve had the space to start two things I’ve wanted to do for a long time: my own marketing business Slone Creative and a toy business NeuroJoy, LLC for kids with autism and/or adhd that support their executive functioning challenges. I also have been able to understand my kids better and help them move through their challenges.

Therapy and ADHD treatment have helped a lot. I feel calmer than I ever have, and while I might not multitask the same way, I’m getting better at finishing things before I transition to the next.

I’ve also realized I used to set goals so high that I could never reach them, so nothing ever felt like enough. That perfectionism kept me stuck. I’m finally starting to move through that.

Amanda: How do you protect your energy now? What do your non-negotiables look like today that didn’t exist two years ago?

Jeni: I’m prioritizing my health for the first time in years by walking, working out, and taking gym classes.

I’m also asking for more help from my spouse. If I need rest, I take it. If I feel overwhelmed, I pause and try to understand why instead of pushing through it. Overall, I’m getting better at setting boundaries around things that disrupt my peace.

I’m still figuring it out, but my goal is simple: feel rested, have time for myself, and still move toward the things I care about.

Amanda: What are 2-3 rituals, tools, or boundaries that currently keep you aligned?

Jeni: I’m still building my routines, but a few things are helping:

• Letting things roll off my back

• Asking for help when I need it

• Taking time to rest without guilt

I joke with my spouse that I’m in my “DGAF” era (Don’t Give A Funnybone) where I don’t care about the small things and it’s been really helpful in making time for my priorities.

Amanda: What would you say to the woman who is currently in the thick of the burnout (or a midlife ADHD diagnosis), feeling like she can’t stop because everything will fall apart if she does?

Jeni: You’re not alone.

There are so many women feeling this way, even if it doesn’t look like it from the outside. If you stop, it might feel like everything will fall apart—and maybe some things will—but continuing the way you are will cost you more.

Taking time for your mental and physical health can be life-changing. Therapy, support, even medication if needed—it all matters.

If you’re a perfectionist like I was, start paying attention to where your expectations of yourself are just too much. There’s a balance where you can still do great work and actually feel good about it. You don’t have to run yourself into the ground to prove your worth.

And most importantly—you can change your story. You can change your destination. You’re not stuck, even if it feels like it. You’re the one in charge of where this goes next.

Lean on people. Find others who get it. And give yourself permission to build a life that actually feels like yours—not one based on expectations.

Amanda: What is one “sociocultural hand-me-down” (a norm or expectation) that you have officially decided to stop carrying?

Jeni: That success has to follow a certain path and that struggling mentally somehow means you’re doing something wrong or not good enough.

For a long time, I thought titles like CMO or CEO were the goal. I paid attention to office politics, tried to play the game, and slowly felt a lot of my joy slipping away. There’s been real grief in letting go of that version of success, because it felt secure and validated.

But letting that idea go has been so satisfying and powerful. I’ve realized that just because something is the “expected” path doesn’t mean it’s my path.

I also grew up in a Christian family where I quietly absorbed the idea that anxiety and depression were tied to not trusting God enough. And that’s something I’ve had to really unlearn. Now I understand that there can be real chemical imbalances at play, and that I can still have faith and get support. There’s nothing wrong with therapy. There’s nothing wrong with medication. And there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging things like ADHD or depression.

In fact, some of the most creative, impactful people in the world are neurodiverse. They see things differently and that difference is what makes their work incredible.

I’m learning to accept that about myself, too, and to build a life and career that actually honors how I’m wired, instead of trying to force myself into something I was never meant to fit.

Amanda: Have you changed your approach to work? If so, how?

Jeni: I moved into freelancing just two months ago and I love it.

There’s uncertainty, but there’s also freedom. I’m learning how to sell, how to tell my own story, and how to build something from scratch.

And the biggest win? More time with my family.

Amanda: Tell me anything else you want me to know about this season of life for you.

Jeni: Getting let go from my job was hard, but it gave me something that is priceless.

It gave me time to slow down and recognize that my daughter was struggling with reading, so I could give her the support she needed. We read and enjoyed a gamified reading app every day and she went from barely reading to thriving in just a few months. That never would have happened if I had kept pushing at the same pace.

That experience changed me.

I may not be making the income I used to yet, but I’m calmer, healthier, and honestly happier than I’ve ever been.I will no longer work until I’m exhausted and I do this by setting more realistic expectations for due dates and deliverables. I will say no to anything that sounds or feels draining regardless of the pay. In my particular situation, my mortality is top of mind. This is the only life I get so I have to be very intentional about how I spend my time now.

Making memories is priority over reaching a salary goal.

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ABOUT JENI

Jeni Slone is the founder of called NeuroJoy® — a company that creates tools and toys that support executive functioning in children. She hosts the podcast NeuroMom: Diagnosed by Motherhood, and delivers marketing strategy consulting through www.slonecreative.com.

A healthcare marketing leader and creative strategist with more than 15 years of experience translating complex clinical ideas into clear, compelling stories that drive action.

Her path into marketing wasn’t linear. Early on, Jeni was equally drawn to science and the arts, playing clarinet and saxophone while excelling in math and science, pursuing a pre-med track. She spent over three years immersed in cancer research while preparing for medical school. Despite her persistence, she ultimately found herself at a crossroads.

An aptitude assessment pointed her in an unexpected direction: film and media.

She attended film school and transitioned into television and film production, where she developed a strong foundation in storytelling, pacing, and visual communication. After experiencing the intensity of 18-hour production days, she pivoted into marketing, finding a space where analytical thinking and creative execution could coexist.

In a more recent chapter of her life, Jeni’s perspective has deepened in a personal way. After navigating diagnoses of autism and ADHD with her two children, she began to recognize similar patterns in herself. That journey led to her own ADHD diagnosis, offering new context for a lifetime of anxiety and opening the door to a season of growth and self-understanding.

Today, Jeni is exploring what it means to live and work more authentically, unmasking patterns, embracing how her brain works, and integrating that awareness into both her personal life and her professional approach.

I’d love to hear from you.

Jeni said that understanding how her brain actually works — not how she’d been told it should work — was what finally let her show up fully. What is one thing about how you work, rest, or process the world that you’ve spent years apologizing for, that might actually be something to understand differently?

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Jeni’s story is about what becomes possible when you finally stop overriding yourself — and start building a life around how you actually work.

That’s the work we do inside The Sanctuary, year-round.

As a certified sound practitioner and author of The Rest Revolution, I create immersive soundbath sessions built specifically for high-achieving women whose nervous systems have forgotten what stillness feels like. Whether you have 10 minutes between meetings or an hour to go deep — these recordings hold space for exactly where you are.

Paid subscribers get full access to the growing library.

And if this month moved something in you — if you’re ready to go deeper than the free posts can take you — the Inner Sanctuary is where we do that work together. I’m keeping founding membership small, intentionally. A few spots remain.

Paid subscribers get full access to the growing library.

Upgrade to Unlock The Sanctuary

Noteworthy

Share THE Rest REVOLUTION

May is Mental Health Month — and all month long, I’m publishing real burnout stories from high-achieving women who chose themselves anyway. New interview every Friday. Share this one with someone who needs to hear it.

If you missed the previous interviews in this series, check them out here:

Summer Swafford knows what it looks like to have life all mapped out. She also knows what it looks like to lose herself completely, as she did while working from her mother’s hospital room, handling her parents’ estate, and onboarding two jobs simultaneously.

Her burnout breaking point came 2 months after her mother’s death: aimlessly walking around a city she’d lived in for a decade, completely lost in her own body.

What came after that kind of bottom was a year of incubation, the permission to close her business entirely, and a reframe about what productivity actually means.

Summer’s realization that ‘high achievers can operate at 85% and no one will notice but them,’ is exactly what someone needs to hear right now.

I’m grateful to Summer for her honesty, and for what she’s making possible by telling this story.

Without further delay, here’s my conversation with Summer Swafford.

The Realigning Interview No. 5 - From Operating at 110% to Restructuring at 85% with Summer Swafford

Amanda: Before you hit your wall, how did you define success? What did your daily life look like, and what were the hand-me-down beliefs that were driving you?

Summer: I defined success as high income from either a leadership job title or successful business venture while mothering high-achieving children and being in the best shape of my life. I was an Executive Assistant and turned that into an Operations Consulting business. I became a respiratory therapist. Then I started working at a law firm. It was one goal after another.

My daily life was go-go-go! I was up at 6 AM, rushing all the time to get to the next appointment, next meeting, next practice, or next activity. The hand-me-down beliefs were to focus on getting and keeping a good job and that I would be measured by my productivity. I would work in my car, take calls at the doctor’s appointments, whip out my laptop at soccer practice, and work late into the night. I was always told to keep my head down and work hard and I would be rewarded but there was never any message of how to receive, or rest, or just be.

Amanda: Burnout rarely happens overnight. Looking back, what were the early signals your body or spirit was sending you that you initially ignored?

Summer: I started gaining weight. I also was tired all the time no matter how much I slept. My mind never stopped. I pulled a muscle in my back that radiated down to my toes, and had no prior injuries of any sort before then.

Normally, I’m considered very sharp and pay close attention to details. I started missing small details. Then I started forgetting things. Even if I wrote things down I would forget where I wrote them. I also started losing things. I felt overstimulated and pulled in so many directions at once. Everyone wanted something from me because of my talents (resume writing, operations support, etc.) and I could not say no. I felt like a bad person if I couldn’t push through.

Amanda: Was there a specific burnout breaking point - a moment when you realized you couldn’t keep going the way you were? What did that bottom look like for you?

Summer: The specific breaking point was right before my mother passed away. She was my last living parent. I was working from her hospital room while she was getting a procedure done. I was onboarding for a second full-time role, running a business, and mothering.

Once she passed away, I had to take on handling my parents’ estate through the probate courts. I quit one role and pushed through with the other role for six months. I eventually quit that role, too, and just put everything down. I solo traveled overseas for two weeks. I had to tell a friend that she could not join me on this trip because this time alone was just for me.

The bottom looked like this: Maybe two months after my mother passed away, I walked out of a restaurant one day and was aimlessly walking around, not knowing where my vehicle was. I was on autopilot and realized in that moment that I was completely lost in a city I had lived in for a decade.

I was not present in my own body.

Amanda: As you began to recover, what was the hardest belief or habit to let go of?

Summer: The hardest belief to let go of was that I had to be super productive with any spare moment I had. I prided myself on being able to get so much more done than the average person. If I wasn’t productive with every free moment then I considered myself lazy. That simply wasn’t true. I would plan out what I would work on while waiting in carpool, sitting in a waiting room, or on hold on a call. There was no downtime. My cup was beyond empty and there was no plan in place to refill it.

Amanda: In my work, I talk about the seasons of purpose. What did your “winter” (your period of rest or incubation) look like? How did you give yourself permission to do nothing?

Summer: My season of incubation was one full year (2025). I chose not to work in my business. In fact, I closed my business down altogether. I did not sign my son up for a ton of extracurricular activities. Instead he had one activity which was one day a week. I said no to anything that did not light me up. I found simple roles that required only a portion of my effort.

After my two-week trip where I spoiled myself, I came back with a more settled nervous system. I decided on that trip that something had to change. My motto was do something just for me every day and perhaps have one side quest per month. That included enjoying super bowl in my city, enjoying Mardi Gras parades, taking a nap, buying a new puzzle, being a tourist in my own city, or reading a book.

Amanda: How do you protect your energy now? What do your non-negotiables look like today that didn’t exist two years ago?

Summer: I started putting puzzles together as a way to slow down and stay offline. I go walking three times a week in a park when I can. I walk away from my laptop during the day and do nothing on purpose (usually the puzzles or making a fancy breakfast).

I will no longer work until I’m exhausted and I do this by setting more realistic expectations for due dates and deliverables. I will say no to anything that sounds or feels draining regardless of the pay. In my particular situation, my mortality is top of mind. This is the only life I get so I have to be very intentional about how I spend my time now. Making memories is priority over reaching a salary goal.

Amanda: What are 2-3 rituals, tools, or boundaries that currently keep you aligned?

Summer: I must touch my puzzle for at least 30 minutes before school pick up. I have an accountability buddy to remind me to move my body with physical activity every day. I have uninstalled most social media apps from my phone. There is a definitive start and stop time for work. I listen to Amanda’s sound baths, play chakra chants, and take a lot of epson salt baths.

Amanda: What would you say to the woman who is currently in the thick of the burnout, feeling like she can’t stop because everything will fall apart if she does?

Summer: It may fall apart and that just means the structure is probably unsustainable in the long term. High achievers operate at 110-120% most of the time. They should know that operating at 85-90% is totally acceptable. Restructure your life where 85% is your new normal. No one will notice but you.

Thank me later.

Amanda: What is one “sociocultural hand-me-down” (a norm or expectation) that you have officially decided to stop carrying?

Summer: I have no desire to be a perfect mom. I am a present and engaged mom. I don’t want my child to be perfect. I want him to become his best self by taking the journey from childhood to adulthood to learn himself — his likes, dislikes, triggers, and tools to reset his nervous system.

Amanda: Tell me anything else you want me to know about this season of realigning.

Summer: This season of realigning is refreshing. I accept that I have choices that include saying “no” with no explanation. My desire to vibrate on a higher level and remain there means I have to stop looking at what is in front of me and see it all as a burden. There will always be a laundry list of tasks and projects to tackle. I have to choose what I am willing to tackle and leave the rest for another day. This is not failure or laziness. This is freedom and with freedom comes real living.

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ABOUT SUMMER

Over a two-decade career, Summer Swafford has done it all from serve as an executive assistant to a respiratory therapist to a small business owner. These days, she spends her time as a paralegal and a soccer mom to her tween son. Her latest hobby involves sharing first-hand accounts of lessons learned and aha moments as she navigates the administrative burden of handling her parents' estate, advocating for and supporting adult children who typically walk this path alone.

I’d love to hear from you.

Summer talks about the moment she realized she was aimlessly walking through a city she'd lived in for a decade, not present in her own body. I'd love to hear from you: What is one moment where you realized you'd checked out, even if you're still physically showing up?

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Summer was operating at 110–120% most of the time — juggling executive work, a business, respiratory therapy, law, and mothering — until she wasn’t. Two months after her mother’s death, she was walking through a city she’d lived in for a decade and realized she was completely lost. She wasn’t present in her own body or her own life.

Her rebuild came with a radical restructuring: 85% is your new normal. High achievers don’t need to do everything. They need to know what’s irreplaceably theirs.

If you’ve been doing it all and still feeling like you’re doing it wrong, this is where you start. The Genius + Clarity Bundle helps you identify what only you can bring so you can stop trying to be everything to everyone and start being the one thing that matters.

→ Download The Genius + Clarity Bundle.

The Genius + Clarity Bundle

Keke Palmer’s Rest Revolution

If you want to understand the systemic roots of burnout, watch Keke Palmer’s new TED Talk. She beautifully bridges the gap between childhood trauma, poverty, and our collective obsession with overworking.

Keke speaks to the unique weight of carrying an entire family’s upward mobility on your back, revealing how the urgency of survival forces us to equate stopping with erasure.

It’s a stunning talk, which could have been a chapter in The Rest Revolution. For Keke’s revolution is the radical act of turning off the generational survival systems that no longer serve us, so we can finally reclaim our presence.

Summer’s nervous system spent twenty years operating at 110–120%. After it broke, she learned that settling it back down required slow, unglamorous, non-negotiable rest.

Her toolkit included puzzles, epsom salt baths, chakra chants, and my soundbaths — which she listens to as part of her daily practice now.

That kind of prescriptive rest that asks your body what it needs instead of what it can produce is exactly what the Sanctuary soundbath library is designed for.

As a certified sound practitioner and author of The Rest Revolution, I create immersive soundbath sessions built specifically for high-achieving women whose nervous systems have forgotten what stillness feels like. Whether you have 10 minutes between meetings or an hour to go deep, these recordings hold space for exactly where you are.

Summer found her way back through these sessions. You can, too.

Paid subscribers get full access to the growing library.

Upgrade to Unlock The Sanctuary

Noteworthy

They say a hit dog will holler. Well, if you resonate at all with the content of this Substack, get ready to holler because this talk strikes a chord.

If you want to understand the systemic roots of burnout, Keke Palmer’s new TED Talk beautifully bridges the gap between childhood trauma, poverty, and our collective obsession with overworking.

I watch Keke’s podcast episodes on YouTube, so the algorithm served her up to me from the TED stage. I had no idea her talk would be so immediately resonant and relevant to me, and to this community. I watched it three times in a row.

Keke speaks to the weight of carrying her entire family’s upward mobility on her back, revealing how the urgency of survival forced her to equate stopping at any point with going back to a life of Section 8 housing and hot Cheetos for breakfast. The pressure. The guilt. My God!

For the Black girls who are now the Rich Aunties who made it out yet still send money back to the hood, this hits home. Hard.

For immigrants who moved to The States and still support entire households back in their home countries, this will resonate deeply.

To the survivors of childhood trauma who climbed their way to safety but are realizing in adulthood that the very hyper-vigilance and high achievement that saved you is now keeping you from actually living, we see you.

For high achievers who figured out early that their talent, smarts, or athletic prowess was their family’s ticket out, and once out, they never turned off the muscle memory of overworking on autopilot [chapter two in The Rest Revolution], prepare to feel seen.

Even if your story arc doesn’t include extreme poverty or bread-winning before age 15, trust me, Keke’s story touches something I cannot name.

It’s a stunning talk, which could have been a chapter in The Rest Revolution. Keke’s revolution is the radical act of turning off the generational survival systems that no longer serve us, so we can finally begin to live beyond our labor.

Key Quotes from Keke’s Talk:

• On hyper-functioning as a trap: “Survival can be so effective you don’t realize when it’s no longer serving you.” [00:45]

• On the fear of stopping: “Stopping never felt like a choice, just an ultimatum.” [08:08]

• The core thesis: “When adaptive intelligence outlives the conditions it was built for, it turns into compulsion. Productivity without presence.” [10:02]

• On why we resist resting: “You might think you need to earn more, prove more... until you finally feel safe. When in reality, you don’t need another achievement. You need a break.” [10:27]

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If you liked Keke Palmer’s Ted Talk, You’ll Love The Stories in Our Mental Health Month Series…

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May is Mental Health Month — and all month long, I’m publishing real burnout stories from high-achieving women who chose themselves anyway. New interview every Friday. Share this one with someone who needs to hear it.

Karla Trotman is the President and CEO of Electro Soft, Inc., a 40-year-old electronics manufacturer she acquired from her parents in 2020 — the year COVID decided to blow up the world. She’s led her company through tariffs, supply chain chaos, and a global economic unraveling without laying off a single employee. Her burnout story is not about slowing down by choice, but about what happens when your body makes the choice for you, and what she learned when she finally started listening.

I’m grateful to Karla for her characteristic honesty, and for modeling what it looks like when a woman stops fighting her body and starts working with it instead.

If you missed the first two interviews in this series, check them out here:

Without further delay, here’s my conversation with Karla Trotman.

The Realigning Interview No. 4 - From Surviving Every External Storm to Facing the One Within with Karla Trotman

Amanda: Before you hit your wall, how did you define success?

Karla: I took over my family’s business, and in my mind, success had one speed: exponential. No coasting. No plateaus. Exponential.

What I did not account for was buying my family out in 2020 — right before COVID decided to blow up the entire world. And honestly? The world has not recovered, and neither has my calendar.

Every single year since has come with its own headline crisis, custom-delivered to my front door. COVID slowed orders to a crawl. Cash flow got tight enough to make me wince. Supply chain chaos had shipments arriving whenever they felt like it, which wreaked havoc on my cash conversion cycle. Then came tariffs 1.0. Then — because apparently one round wasn’t enough — tariffs 2.0. I could not catch a break if someone handed it to me gift-wrapped.

So I did what any overachiever does: I worked myself into the ground trying to control the uncontrollable. I built checklists so detailed, so elaborate, that no human being — including me — could actually get through them. Dinner got pushed later and later until eventually, dinner just... stopped happening. Workouts? Gone. Rest? A rumor.

And underneath all of it was this quiet, relentless fear of failure.

Then perimenopause showed up. Uninvited. Right on schedule.

Because that’s the thing nobody puts in the brochure: we are told as women to have it all, do it all, and make it look effortless. But all was actively trying to take me out.

Amanda: Burnout rarely happens overnight. Looking back, what were the early signals your body or spirit was sending you that you initially ignored?

Karla: The tricky part about my early signals is that perimenopause was happening at the exact same time, which made everything easy to misattribute.

My patience had completely evaporated. I preferred being home over being anywhere near people. Friends, family, colleagues, strangers in parking lots... everyone irritated me. And what did my doctor say? Perimenopause. What did my friends say? Perimenopause. What did my family say? Perimenopause. And here is where it gets dangerous: when you become a woman of a certain age, a perfect storm is already brewing, and blaming everything on hormones means nobody looks deeper.

Think about what is happening all at once. If you are married, this is statistically the peak window for divorce, so there is real relationship strain. If you have children, they are teenagers, which means they are testing every nerve you have left. They also enter what psychologists call the “soiling the nest” phase, where they are actively preparing to leave and acting like it. Meanwhile, your prime earning years collide head-on with the highest-stakes business decisions of your career.

My body was sending SOS signals, and I was too busy to read them.

My shoulders were permanently locked. My masseuse told me my back felt like a cement block. Not tight. A cement block. All the CBD oils, hot stones, and lavender-scented everything in the world could not touch it.

And my doctor’s solution? Yoga.

So I did what any reasonable, sleep-deprived, cement-backed woman would do. I bypassed the yoga suggestion entirely and asked for a mild sleeping pill. Because if I could not fix the stress, I could at least try to get some sleep.

Amanda: Was there a specific burnout breaking point - a moment when you realized you couldn’t keep going the way you were? What did that bottom look like for you?

Karla: There was no single dramatic moment. It was more like a slow accumulation of evidence that my body was staging a revolt.

I kept gaining weight. Then came the snoring, which led to a mild sleep apnea diagnosis. Then my labs came back with high LDL cholesterol, elevated A1C, and a few other numbers that got my attention in the worst way.

The turning point came at a business event where a health coach started talking about inflammation. I thought I knew what inflammation was. Turns out, I did not. Not really. I had no idea that food, the very thing meant to fuel you, could quietly trigger your body to work against itself. I thought I was eating healthy enough. I was wrong. I was consuming things that were making me sicker, and I had no idea.

And that multivitamin I was faithfully taking every morning? Not enough. Not even close. I started working with a metabolic specialist who helped me understand exactly what my body actually needed, not what the generic wellness advice said, but what my body needed.

And then there is the matter of my doctor and her yoga suggestion. The one I dismissed with a sleeping pill request.

She was right.

Here is what I did not know: those intense workouts I thought were saving me were actually spiking my cortisol. For women at this stage of life, that is the opposite of helpful. What we actually need is yoga. Pilates. Movement that restores instead of depletes.

I had been fighting my body when I should have been working with it.

Amanda: As you began to recover, what was the hardest belief or habit to let go of?

Karla: The hardest thing I had to let go of was the belief that working harder could fix everything.

I had to come to terms with the fact that no matter how maniacally I worked, I could not move tariffs. I could not untangle global geopolitics. I could not control the outside forces that were battering my business, and honestly, every business. This was not just my problem. It was a worldwide disruption, and no checklist on earth was going to solve it. I could only control what was actually within my reach, and learning to tell the difference was its own kind of work.

I also had to reckon with something more personal. As you grow, as you evolve, not every space you once belonged in grows with you. Some communities that once filled you up eventually stop fitting. And that is not a betrayal of where you came from. That is just what evolution looks like up close. I had to give myself permission to move on without guilt.

And then I rewrote my relationship with my calendar entirely.

My health gets scheduled first now. Those early morning meetings? The camera does not come on unless that meeting is directly making the company money. In fact, I might be on the treadmill during it. I might be walking my dog. And I have made my peace with that completely.

I do not have to show up perfect in order to show up. That one took me a while. But I got there.

Amanda: In my work, I talk about the seasons of purpose. What did your “winter” look like?

Karla: My winter was not pretty, and it was not peaceful in the way people romanticize rest. It was survival mode with better boundaries.

It started with my health. I began uploading my lab results and health data into AI just to understand what my own body was doing in plain English. No more nodding along at doctor’s appointments pretending I followed everything. I wanted to actually understand what was happening to me, and that became my focus.

I turned down almost everything socially. If you were not someone I was genuinely close to, the answer was no. Not maybe. No. Any relationship that was not actively breathing life into me got released. And because everything and everybody had already been working my last nerve, I did not feel particularly guilty about it.

Here is what clarified it for me: I did not want to end up a lonely, friendless, empty-nested divorcee. That image was enough motivation to get very honest, very quickly, about what and who was actually worth my time and energy.

So winter, for me, looked like radical curation. Of my calendar. Of my circle. Of my energy. It was not glamorous. But it was necessary.

Amanda: How do you protect your energy now? What do your non-negotiables look like today that didn't exist two years ago?

Karla: I guard my energy now like it is a finite resource, because I finally understand that it is.

Every invitation gets evaluated. Every ask gets weighed. I do not say yes out of obligation or guilt or because I cannot figure out how to say no gracefully. If something is not a “hell yes,” it is a strong no. Full stop. I have earned that at this point in my life, and I am not apologizing for it.

I also cannot pour from an empty cup to the point where I am the one suffering. That used to be my default setting. Not anymore.

And then there is yoga.

I started nine months ago. I want to be clear: I do not love it. But I have accepted that it is prescriptive, meaning my body actually needs it whether my personality agrees or not. And something quietly shifted. I am more flexible than I have been in years. I have gotten into breathwork in a real way, using it to actually calm my mind and body instead of just powering through whatever I am feeling.

Two years ago, none of this existed in my life. Not the boundaries, not the breathwork, not the very reluctant but consistent yoga practice. It turns out that healing is less about a dramatic overhaul and more about a series of unglamorous decisions you make and keep making.

Amanda: What are 2-3 rituals, tools, or boundaries that currently keep you aligned?

Karla: The calendar has a bodyguard.

My assistant knows one standing rule: nothing gets scheduled before 10 AM. That protected morning is mine. It is for working out, for not rushing, for doing the things that keep me functional as a human being. It sounds simple. It has been transformative.

I rebuilt my healthcare team and actually use it.

My primary care physician still sees me, but now we see each other quarterly. She has noticed that I come in more diligent and more informed, and our visits reflect that. Beyond her, I added a hormone doctor and a metabolic specialist so that I am being seen as a whole person rather than a collection of symptoms to explain away. And I am not too proud to text a friend. I have friends who are physicians, including an endocrinologist who has been invaluable when it comes to understanding specific tests and results. I use AI to keep all of my health information organized and share summary results across my entire team so that everyone is working from the same information. No more fragmented care where one hand does not know what the other is doing. Everyone is singing off the same sheet of music, and I am the one conducting.

Amanda: What would you say to the woman who is currently in the thick of the burnout, feeling like she can’t stop because everything will fall apart if she does?

Karla: Back in my corporate supply chain days, I watched a colleague refuse to take lunch. Every single day. And I looked at him and said, “You know, if you died at your desk right now, they would roll your dead ass out the door in that chair and hire the next person before it got cold.”

He thought he was the cornerstone of a large global organization. We always think that. Especially entrepreneurs, because the stakes feel even higher when you are the visionary, the decision-maker, and possibly the person signing everyone else’s paychecks. The weight of that is real.

But here is what is also real: part of scaling a business is building a number two who can step in when you cannot. Creating that role is not a sign of weakness. It is a growth strategy. It is what separates a business from a one-woman show.

And if you will not create space for yourself intentionally, your body will eventually create it for you. Involuntarily. On its own timeline, not yours. And that version is a lot harder to bounce back from than simply carving out a new morning routine.

So yes, things might wobble a little while you step back. But they will not fall apart. And even if they do, you cannot catch anything if you are the one falling.

Amanda: What is one "sociocultural hand-me-down" that you have officially decided to stop carrying?

Karla: Respectability politics. I am done with it.

For a long time, I absorbed the idea that in order to belong in certain rooms, I had to sand down my edges. Be twice as prepared, twice as composed, twice as palatable. Show up in a way that made everyone else comfortable, even if it made me smaller.

But somewhere in this season of my life, I stopped. I show up in braids now. In cornrows. I let a colloquialism land when it wants to. I bring my full Black self into every room, onto every stage, into every customer conversation, and something unexpected happened. I got better. More magnetic. More effective. Because authenticity is not a liability. It is actually your greatest competitive advantage.

We were sold a bad bill of goods. The story that we had to be a palatable, carefully curated version of ourselves in order to be taken seriously. That story was never true. It was just a test to see how much of ourselves we were willing to give up to make other people comfortable.

I failed that test on purpose.

Being fully myself is what allows me to be fully at my best. In business. On stage. In life. All of it. And I wish someone had told me that twenty years earlier.

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ABOUT KARLA

Karla Trotman is the President and CEO of Electro Soft, Inc., a 40-year-old electronics contract manufacturer serving industrial, defense, aviation, rail, and transit clients across the country. She acquired the company from her parents in 2020 and has led it through some of the most turbulent years in modern business history without laying off a single employee.

Karla is the author of Dark, Dirty, Dangerous: Building the Vibrant Future of Manufacturing, an Amazon number one bestseller, and a nationally recognized speaker on manufacturing and entrepreneurship. She is an EY Entrepreneur of the Year, Titan 100 Philadelphia honoree, and Philadelphia Business Journal Most Admired CEO.

She holds a B.S. in Business Logistics from Penn State University and an MBA from Drexel University, and she serves on boards including the Museum of the American Revolution and the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation.

Karla is a proud member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., a boy mom, and a woman who has learned, sometimes the hard way, that being fully herself is her greatest professional asset.

I’d love to hear from you.

Karla said she had been “fighting her body when she should have been working with it.” What is one signal your body has been sending you that you’ve been explaining away, misattributing, or simply too busy to hear?

Leave a comment

Karla’s burnout didn’t announce itself.

It arrived as snoring, a cholesterol number, and a back so tense her masseuse called it a cement block. It was amped up by the cortisol she didn’t know she was spiking with the workouts she thought were saving her. Her body had been keeping score for years, she just didn’t know how to read it yet.

If your body has been trying to tell you something, this is where you start paying attention.

The Burnout Cycle Audit is a free tool to help you identify the patterns your body has been signaling before they escalate into something harder to ignore.

→ Download The Burnout Cycle Audit

Download The Burnout Cycle Audit

Karla started yoga nine months ago. She doesn’t love it, but she’s learned that her body needs it, whether her personality agrees or not. She’s more flexible than she’s been in years. Her breathwork practice actually calms her now, instead of just holding her together.

That kind of slow, unglamorous, prescriptive rest is exactly what the Sanctuary soundbath library is designed for.

As a certified sound practitioner and author of The Rest Revolution, I create immersive soundbath sessions built specifically for high-achieving women whose nervous systems have forgotten what stillness feels like. Whether you have 10 minutes between meetings or an hour to go deep, these recordings hold space for exactly where you are.

Paid subscribers get full access to the growing library.

Upgrade to Unlock The Sanctuary

Noteworthy

Share THE Rest REVOLUTION

Welcome back to The Rest Revolution Realigning Interview, a series here on Substack where I feature conversations with high achievers who are rethinking their relationship to work, rest, and ambition. Inspired by the stories I explored in The Rest Revolution, this series is an ongoing dialogue about burnout, productivity, and the deeper question of what it truly means to live well.

Dr. Allissa V. Richardson is an associate professor of journalism at USC’s Annenberg School. I noticed Allissa’s talent when I first encountered her in July 2010. She was leading a workshop, “Creating a live multimedia blog,” at the National Association of Black Journalists Annual Conference in San Diego. I was blown away by her mind, skill, and facility with digital tools, which were new back then. Her preparation made a huge impression on me back then, but today she shares what happens when that preparation backfires.

I’m grateful to Allissa for her honesty and for naming something so many high-achieving women feel but rarely say out loud.

Without further delay, here’s my conversation with Dr. Allissa Richardson.

The Realigning Interview No. 3 - Prepared for Everything. Ready for Nothing with Allissa Richardson

Amanda: Before you gave up over-preparation and perfectionism, how did you define success?

Allissa: I used to define success as being indisputably prepared—so prepared that no one could question my legitimacy; especially in rooms where no one else looked like me. My days were long and tightly scheduled. I was always thinking three steps ahead: reading more than necessary, over-building lectures, over-editing writing, over-performing competence.

The hand-me-down belief was simple: you have to work twice as hard to get half as much—and even then, it might not be enough. I inherited that from both family and the institutions I moved through. Productivity was not just about output; it was about protection. Preparation was armor.

Amanda: Burnout rarely happens overnight. Looking back, what were the early signals your body or spirit was sending you about the dangers of your perfectionism and over-preparation that you initially ignored?

Allissa: My body was always tired, but I normalized it. I had trouble resting without guilt. Even in stillness, my mind was rehearsing, refining, revising.

Spiritually, I felt a kind of quiet resentment creeping in—toward work I used to love. I was doing meaningful things, but I was not experiencing them as meaningful. That disconnection was an early warning sign. I ignored it because everything looked “successful” from the outside.

Amanda: Was there a specific burnout breaking point—a moment when you realized you could not keep going the way you were? What did that bottom look like for you?

Allissa: It was less a dramatic collapse and more a quiet realization: I had built a life that required me to constantly override myself.

The breaking point came when I noticed that even my wins felt exhausting. There was no arrival—just the next demand. That was the moment I understood that sustainability, not achievement, had to become the metric.

Amanda: As you recover, what has been the hardest belief or habit to let go of?

Allissa: The hardest thing to release has been the belief that my value is tied to how much I can produce or how much I can carry as a single mom-scholar.

Letting go of over-preparation feels risky, because it means trusting that I am enough as I am, not just as I perform. That is a deeper shift than any productivity habit—it is an identity shift.

Amanda: In my work, I talk about the seasons of purpose. What did your “winter” look like? What did you give yourself permission to stop doing?

Allissa: My winter was quieter than I expected. It was not dramatic withdrawal—it was intentional reduction.

I gave myself permission to stop overcommitting, to stop saying yes out of obligation, to stop over-explaining my decisions. I stepped back from unnecessary visibility. I let some opportunities pass without chasing them.

Most importantly, I stopped trying to prove something every day.

Amanda: How do you protect your energy now? What do your non-negotiables look like today that did not exist two years ago?

Allissa: I am much more selective now. Not everything that is “good” is right for me.

My non-negotiables include:

• Protecting uninterrupted time for deep work and then rest

• Not responding to everything immediately

• Saying no without over-justifying

I also pay attention to how things feel in my body. If something consistently drains me, I take that seriously.

Amanda: What are 2–3 rituals, tools, or boundaries that currently keep you aligned and from falling back into over-preparation and perfectionism?

Allissa: First, I set clear limits on preparation time. At some point, I have to trust what I already know.

Second, I work in drafts—mentally and materially. I allow things to be incomplete before they are polished.

Third, I build in recovery time after major outputs. I do not stack intensity the way I used to. I also don’t panic when people ask me, “So, what’s next?” right after a big win. I am okay with saying, “I don’t know yet.”

Amanda: What would you say to the high-achiever who feels like everything will fall apart if they stop?

Allissa: I would tell them that everything feels like it will fall apart because you have trained yourself to hold it all together.

But the truth is, the system you built is unsustainable—and it is costing you more than you realize.

Nothing meaningful that is meant for you depends on you being in a constant state of depletion. You can recalibrate without losing everything. In fact, you might finally experience what you have been working for.

Amanda: What is one “sociocultural hand-me-down” you have decided to stop carrying?

Allissa: That excellence requires exhaustion.

I no longer believe that being tired is evidence of being committed. That idea has been deeply normalized, especially for Black women in professional spaces, but I have chosen to reject it.

Amanda: Have you changed your approach to work? If so, how?

Allissa: Yes. I have shifted from intensity to intentionality.

I still care deeply about my work, but I no longer approach everything at maximum capacity. I prioritize what matters, and I allow the rest to be good—not perfect.

I am also more collaborative now. I do not assume I have to carry everything alone. I have built wonderfully supportive teams of family, friends, colleagues, students and others who can help execute various parts of my vision, especially when I feel myself getting tired. I was able to take a year-long sabbatical this year due to those support systems finally working the ways I wanted them to.

Amanda: Anything else you want me to know about burnout and this season of life?

Allissa: Burnout is not just about doing too much—it is about doing too much in ways that disconnect you from yourself.

This season of sabbatical for me has been about rebuilding that connection. Slowing down enough to hear myself again. Trusting that I do not have to earn rest or justify ease.

I am still ambitious. I am just no longer willing to sacrifice myself to prove it.

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ABOUT ALLISSA

Dr. Allissa V. Richardson is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School. She researches how African Americans use mobile and social media to produce innovative forms of journalism — especially in times of crisis. Dr. Richardson is the best-selling author of Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism (Oxford University Press, 2020). The award-winning book explores the lives of 15 mobile journalist-activists who documented the Black Lives Matter movement using only their smartphones and Twitter.

Dr. Richardson is the Founding Director of the USC Charlotta Bass Journalism & Justice Lab. The research center saves, studies and shares Black media that changed the world. In February 2023, the Bass Lab successfully lobbied the city of Los Angeles to name a citywide holiday for Charlotta Bass, who was the first Black woman to own a newspaper on the West Coast. That same month, the Bass Lab debuted the University’s first AI-powered Black oral history interviewee — Lora King — who is the daughter of the late Rodney King, whose brutal police encounter was caught on tape in 1991.

Dr. Richardson’s research on Black citizen journalism has been published in Journal of Communication, Digital Journalism, Journalism Studies, and many other venues. She has lectured to diverse and wide-ranging audiences around the world — from SXSW to SnapChat, Microsoft and the NFL. Her expertise in mobile media activism has made her a frequent commentator for news outlets such as ABC, BBC, CBC, Columbia Journalism Review, Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, NPR, Teen Vogue and Vox.

Dr. Richardson is the National Association of Black Journalists’ Journalism Educator of the Year (‘12). She is an inductee into Apple’s elite Distinguished Educator program. Additionally, Dr. Richardson is the recipient of three esteemed Harvard University posts: the Nieman Foundation Visiting Journalism Fellowship (‘14), the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society Fellowship (‘20), and the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights Fellowship (‘22).

Richardson holds a PhD in journalism studies from the University of Maryland College Park; a master’s degree in magazine publishing from Northwestern University’s Medill School; and a bachelor of science in biology from Xavier University of Louisiana, where she was named a “Top 40 Under 40” alumna.

I’d love to hear from you.

Allissa said that productivity was protection; a way of guarding against being questioned, dismissed, or seen as not enough. What have you been over-preparing for? And what would it mean to trust that you’re already enough to walk into that room?

Leave a comment

Allissa didn’t lose herself all at once.

She lost herself in one over-prepared lecture, one over-edited paragraph, and one room where she felt she had to work twice as hard to take up the same space at a time. The things she’d backburnered, like her creative writing and stillness, didn’t disappear. But they went quiet during the seasons she was overriding her internal wisdom.

If you’ve been so busy demonstrating your value that you’ve lost track of what you actually want, this is where you start.

The Backburnering Inventory is a worksheet designed to help you identify what you’ve quietly set aside in the name of achievement, and begin deciding what you actually want to reclaim.

It’s part of The Rest Revolution worksheet collection. I’m releasing it as a free standalone download for Mental Health Month.

→ Download The Backburnering Inventory (free through May)

Download The Backburnering Inventory

Allissa said the hardest part of recovery wasn’t the professional shift, it was learning to sit with discomfort instead of running from it and stop overriding herself.

That’s exactly what the Sanctuary soundbath library is designed for.

As a certified sound practitioner and author of The Rest Revolution, I create immersive soundbath sessions built specifically for high-achieving women whose nervous systems have forgotten what stillness feels like. Whether you have 10 minutes between meetings or an hour to go deep, these recordings hold space for exactly where you are.

Paid subscribers get full access to the growing library which includes somatic sessions like Drifting: a ten-minute Soudbath for rest and sleep.

Paid subscribers get full access to the growing library.

Upgrade to Unlock The Sanctuary

Noteworthy

May is Mental Health Month, and all month long, I’m publishing real burnout stories from high-achieving women who chose themselves anyway. This series is free to read and share. If it resonates, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming. Subscribe for free. Upgrade to unlock the Sanctuary soundbath library.

See you next Friday.

Share THE Rest REVOLUTION

Welcome back to The Rest Revolution Realigning Interview, a series here on Substack where I feature conversations with high achievers who are rethinking their relationship to work, rest, and ambition. Inspired by the stories I explored in The Rest Revolution, this series is an ongoing dialogue about burnout, productivity, and the deeper question of what it truly means to live well.

I’m excited to continue this series with Crystal Gaskin, whose journey from the heights of corporate achievement to the depths of burnout — and back to herself — is both sobering and deeply inspiring. Her honesty about the physical toll, the identity reckoning, and the slow, sacred work of learning to rest offers a perspective that so many high-achieving women need to hear. I’m grateful to Crystal for sharing her story and for modeling what it looks like to choose yourself, even when everything in you has been trained not to.

Without further delay, here’s my conversation with Crystal Gaskin.

The Realigning Interview No. 2 - From The Heights of Corporate Achievement to the Depths of Burnout And Back with Crystal Gaskin

Amanda: Before you hit your wall, how did you define success?

Crystal: Success, for me, was reaching the top — except the top kept moving. I called it the golden ladder. With it came the title, the prestige, the high-figure income, and all the material gains that followed. My days were stacked with meetings: sometimes I’d be on calls in the car before I even made it to the office. It was non-stop movement: actions, decisions, running on empty. My value and worth felt entirely tied to how much people depended on me for an answer, support, or a decision.

Most days were a blur. By the time I got home, there was still more to do. I checked email until the moment I fell asleep, and woke up to do it all again. It was a perpetual loop.

Amanda: What were the early signals your body or spirit was sending you that you initially ignored?

Crystal: For me, it was a slow burn. The speed at which I operated made it nearly impossible to hear or feel the signals. Near the end of my corporate career, I became emotionally despondent. Things that would have normally stirred a reaction in me just... didn’t matter anymore. I started questioning my why and realized my personal values were no longer aligning with the work I was being asked to do. There was an emotional and spiritual disconnect quietly taking root.

On a physical level, I started experiencing extreme bouts of insomnia. Days without quality sleep led to frequent migraines, which led to self-medicating and other unhealthy habits just to manufacture the energy that was in serious depletion. Poor sleep, poor eating, and less movement all compounded into acute health issues that would eventually surface in a much bigger way.

Amanda: Was there a specific breaking point — a moment when you knew you couldn’t keep going?

Crystal: Honestly, one of the clearest signs came when I was promoted to my last corporate role during one of the most turbulent periods of an acquisition. What should have been a moment of arrival — reaching a level most people spend careers chasing — I cried. Not out of ingratitude or fear, but because I was already depleted. I knew that more would be required of me, and that more of my personal values were going to be tested. I felt a battle coming before I could even find the joy to celebrate.

I stayed in that role for about another year before I had the courage to walk away. I took a six-month sabbatical, and it wasn’t until I fully stopped that my body finally revealed what I had been ignoring for far too long. GI issues turned out to be a much more serious condition. I had a colon resection surgery, and a few months later, a partial nephrectomy to remove a tumor from my kidney.

Amanda: What was the hardest belief or habit to let go of as you began to recover?

Crystal: The physical healing was actually the easier part because it could be justified. No one questions a year off for health reasons. But healing from the emotional beliefs around productivity? That was much harder.

My entire life had been built on validating my worth through accomplishments — the degrees, the promotions, being a good mom, daughter, sister. This time, I had to face a question I had never really sat with: who am I without any of those titles? What once felt like time well spent had started to feel like a countdown to the next thing — something bigger, better, more impressive than before. The fear of losing a momentous career became very real. How do I explain this break? Will I lose my edge? What happens now? Those were my greatest fears, and I had to learn to sit with them instead of run from them.

Amanda: What did your “winter” — your period of rest and incubation — actually look like?

Crystal: At first, I made rest another project. I joined a cohort of women who were “devoted to rest,” initially out of curiosity thinking what is this rest thing, really? But I stayed because I found myself surrounded by other high-achieving women who were also learning how to rest, how to return to themselves. That community cracked something open in me.

I returned to my love of creative writing. I started reconnecting to my body and intuition through somatic arts and Yoga Nidra. I began slowing down — not because it was assigned homework, but because my body deserved softness, care, and devotion. I stopped talking about rest and actually started resting. Taking naps when I was tired. Not performing busyness to deflect the “what are you working on” questions. And quietly, intentionally, I started modeling a new way for my daughter — letting her witness a Black woman simply being deserving of rest.

Amanda: How do you protect your energy now? What are your non-negotiables?

Crystal: I practice slow mornings, and I protect them fiercely. I schedule no meetings before 10am. I commit to at least one rest practice every day. And I keep one full day each week entirely for myself, to do whatever I want. No agenda, no deliverables. That is non-negotiable.

Amanda: What are 2–3 rituals or tools that currently keep you aligned?

Crystal: Walking in nature is one of my favorites. I’m fortunate to have a park just outside my neighborhood with the most beautiful pine trees — I walk that path regularly, and it never fails to restore me.

I also practice body scans — a somatic practice of turning inward. Since my health challenges, I’ve developed what I can only describe as a superpower: the ability to actually feel and listen to my body in ways I never had before. It has become a practice of deep gratitude for life, health, and presence.

And I write. Writing was one of my earliest gifts, and returning to it honors my truth in a way that feels both restorative and cathartic.

Amanda: What would you say to the woman who is currently in the thick of burnout, feeling like she can't stop?

Crystal: I know it feels terrifying to let go of everything you believed about your value and worth, and to step into this unknown space. It’s disorienting. It’s sacred. And most of us rush through it because it’s uncomfortable to stay and because we’re afraid of losing momentum. Or, more honestly, because we need to keep doing just to survive and meet our most basic needs.

I experienced all of that. And whenever I tried to rush the process, the universe would sit me back down and whisper or sometimes scream the same message: rest.

If you are in a season of deep contemplation, I hope this reminds you that a pause is not the end of your story. Sometimes, it is the threshold: the space that gives you room to honor the life you’ve built, and make room for what comes next.

Amanda: What is one sociocultural hand-me-down you have officially decided to stop carrying?

Crystal: This might sound provocative, but the notion of the “American Dream”…I’m done with it. I think we’re watching it unravel in real time, and honestly, it was never ours to carry in the first place. The dream was always someone else’s definition, handed to us and dressed up as aspiration.

The biggest thing I’ve stopped carrying is anyone else’s expectation or definition of success for me. Success, simply put, is designing my own life on my own terms.

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ABOUT CRYSTAL

Crystal Gaskin is a certified executive coach, writer, and founder of The Rested Achiever™, a coaching methodology built for high-achieving women navigating sabbaticals, career transitions, and identity redesign. Her own sabbatical — taken after a 20-year human resources career at Amazon, Honeywell, Kimberly-Clark, and Mailchimp/Intuit, including her tenure as Chief People Officer — reshaped what she thought success required. Today she works with women through 1:1 coaching, invite-only circles, and retreats for senior leadership teams, where rest becomes the catalyst for clarity, sharper strategy, and decisions made on their own terms.

Based in Atlanta, Georgia. Connect with Crystal on LinkedIn.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

How much does Crystal’s story resonate with you? Have you experienced your own breaking point, or are you still pushing through one right now? And what would it mean for you to finally stop, even just for a moment? Let’s keep the conversation going in the comments.

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Crystal didn’t burn out because she failed.

She burned out because she kept carrying other people’s definitions of success, other people’s timelines, and the American Dream that was never built for her in the first place.

If something in her story landed for you, this is where you start.

The Inheritances Inventory is a free tool to help you name exactly what you’ve been carrying, and begin deciding what you actually want to put down.

→ Download The Inheritances Inventory free

Download The Inheritances Inventory

Crystal found her way back through somatic practices like body scans, Yoga Nidra, and learning to actually feel what her body had been trying to say for years.

That’s exactly what the Sanctuary soundbath library is designed for.

As a certified sound practitioner and author of The Rest Revolution, I create immersive soundbath sessions built specifically for high-achieving women whose nervous systems have forgotten what stillness feels like. Whether you have 10 minutes between meetings or an hour to go deep, these recordings hold space for exactly where you are.

Paid subscribers get full access to the growing library.

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Noteworthy

May is Mental Health Month, and all month long, I’m publishing real burnout stories from high-achieving women who chose themselves anyway. This series is free to read and share. If it resonates, subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming. Subscribe for free. Upgrade to unlock the Sanctuary soundbath library.

Since 2021, I’ve centered my work on rest, recovery, and mental health. I was pulled into this conversation by the pandemic burnout running rampant among my clients during my own personal season of burnout. I also needed the jolt of energy creative writing gives me, so freelance writing became a part of my burnout recovery plan.

Personal branding for high achievers clearly in the middle of burnout felt like wrapping someone’s sprained ankle while they bled out from a stab wound. The burnout felt most urgent. That conversation — and the solutions — are not leaving my work. But I am starting to see my connection to a larger conversation much more clearly now.

Once, when writing a review of my book The Rest Revolution, a journalist stated that she was surprised she could learn so much about burnout from a personal branding coach. At the time, even I couldn’t articulate a clear connection. But after five years circling these topics and reflecting on the work that cemented my career, I realized the Package Your Genius client and The Rest Revolution client are the same person at different parts of their journey.

Anyone who dares to package their genius is inherently ambitious. They’re typically not okay with settling and feel eager to share something meaningful with the world. That’s also the profile of a high achiever who, without sustainability in mind, will push themselves to exhaustion.

It’s a pendulum that swings back and forth between the highs of creation and the lows of burnout.

From the energized pursuit of the next big goal to the overwhelm of balancing work with home responsibilities.

From the uncertainty of a blank canvas that asks, Am I good enough? Can I really do this? to the overwhelm of a whiteboard overflowing with leads to invoice, orders to fulfill, students to teach, and clients to nurture.

This is the predictable pattern: swinging back and forth, and back again.

My inner pendulum is swinging back up. I’m still invested in helping you rest, but what’s become more clear to me recently is that I am also undeniably gifted at (and energized by) helping you build. I believe this moment requires both parts of me.

Over lunch the other day, a friend characterized me as a defibrillator who can bring a dying brand, and a person’s dying sense of confidence to put themselves out there back to life.

I was touched by that characterization, even if at first glance it looks antithetical to my message of rest.

Because what’s different about me today is that I want to help you package your genius from a rested place. I want to help you front-burner your joy so you can work in ways that feel good to you. It’s not either/or.

Purposescaping teaches us that no season is wasted.

There’s a time to grow (not grind ) and a time to rest. I can speak authoritatively to both, because the people who need me are navigating one or the other depending on their current season.

In the past few years, The Rest Revolution has felt most urgent. I have literally watched stress and exhaustion topple dear friends and colleagues. The medical events have been hard to witness.

But today’s most urgent threat seems to be economic.

In 2025 alone the United States recorded over 1 million layoffs, the highest number since the pandemic. Alarmingly 300,000 of those layoffs were Black women - the demographic who have comprised the majority of my individual coaching clients over the years. When more than one million people leave the workforce, it is hard to miss the layoff conversation and the impact layoffs are having on individual professionals and their families.

Think of it like this: one million people lost their homes to house fires in the same year. Through some miracle, they all have wood, nails, shingles, and glass — all the materials to rebuild. But they have no tools. And my tool shed is full of perfectly good hammers, unused ladders, and screwdrivers piling up, collecting dust.

At this point, I can’t sit on the tools — or the message — that can help those individuals rebuild.

So I’m still talking about rest. I’m still facilitating sound baths. But I’m also still coaching. Furthermore, I’m still making accessible my proven frameworks that may just feel like a lifeline to people who need new ways to bring in income in an economy that is content to replace them. More on that soon.

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If this essay landed for you and you recognize yourself in the pendulum, in the swinging back and forth between building and burning out, the next step is excavation.

The Genius Inventory is a free self-discovery workbook that helps you name exactly what you’re already holding. The gifts you’ve been sitting on. The work that has always come effortlessly to you. The clarity statement that finally says, out loud, what you’re here to do.

Download it free below.

And if you’re ready to go deeper — to take that genius and point it at something you actually want — the next step is What Do You Actually Want? — the sequel workbook that helps you practice desire without apology and build your Wanting List. Get both together in a clarity bundle for $12.

→ Download The Genius Inventory free

Download the Genius Inventory

→ Download the Clarity Bundle (Genius Inventory +) for $12

Download The Clarity Bundle

As a certified sound practitioner and author of The Rest Revolution, I develop original, immersive soundbath sessions designed for restoration, better sleep, and nervous system regulation. These recorded somatic sessions provide an accessible way to access stillness on your own schedule.

This growing collection is curated to help you find a few moments of stillness and calm. Whether you have 10 minutes to reset between meetings or an hour to harvest the silence of a deeper practice, these recordings are designed to hold space for your possibility.

This collection is available exclusively to our paid community. Upgrade to join us inside the sanctuary and explore the power of sound and somatic healing.

Upgraid to Unlock The Sanctuary

Noteworthy…

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Last spring, I planted seeds for a vegetable garden as an activity for my then four-year-old daughter and me to do together. It was also an experiment to see whether or not I could grow my own food.

I found it fascinating to watch the tiny leaves sprout up from seeds we had planted together, and I was so excited about my thriving little indoor garden. That was, until the clerk at a local garden supply store told me that I would have to take my precious baby plants outside if I wanted them to survive. She also informed me that I had waited too late in the year to start the seeds; they would not have enough warm months to grow to maturity.

Boo.

So I bought some container pots, planted them deep in the soil, then set them outside. I kept a watchful eye on the plants, but as expected, they didn't get very big. They started fizzling out by late summer.

This year, I figured I'd try again, so I got a slightly earlier start. I started collard seeds, tomato seeds, red pepper seeds, and cucumber seeds indoors again. I waited and watched them spring up through the dirt, the plan being that I'd watch them grow strong enough for me to transplant them outside and hopefully have a little garden this year.

It’s still early spring, and my new seeds indoors haven’t gotten big enough, so they’re still inside. But one day I sat outside to have my coffee, and I noticed something strange in last year’s container garden pots.

New green plants were growing in the dirt.

After my vegetables withered away last summer, I left the pots out. They were just bowls of empty dirt as far as I could tell. They had been outside, so I didn't want them back in the house, since now they have ants and other tiny insects crawling around in the dirt. So I just left them outside on the back steps all winter, thinking maybe I would use them in the spring if I decided to try again and grow some new seedlings.

I have not planted anything in those pots this year, and this winter we had record snow and freezing temperatures.

But lo and behold, I have a collard plant growing from last year's root.

I took so many messages applicable to high achievers away from this, including:

• God is full of surprises, so don't count Him or yourself out

• There's always something going on underground, even when the ground looks frozen or barren. This is a lesson I keep coming back to.

• You've already done the work.

And this is the most relevant lesson of today. Personally, I am guilty of thinking my effort doesn't count if I am not overworking myself, starting over from scratch, or working hard in every phase.

But my resilient collard plant is a beautiful reminder that I've put in the work in the past, and the results of those efforts may not have popped up in the same season I expected them to.

The results may not have been evident during the same season that I put in the work.

Maybe what I did in the past is still in the process of maturing. Maybe the fruits of my past labor will still show up in my life at a future point.

At this season of my life, I need that to be true more than ever. Having my foot on the gas for four decades has worn me out, so I am definitely in need of a “let's see what seeds I planted in a previous season are finally mature enough for me to eat off of them,” moment, both figuratively and literally.

I am still planting new collard seeds this spring, but I am encouraged to know I didn't have to plant new seeds to have collard plants this year.

Hopefully, this year’s seeds will survive and thrive for next year, but what an awesome reminder that I don't have to be effort-ing every season to reap rewards during that season.

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One of the ways God speaks to me is through nature, specifically, through plants.

In the Purposescaping framework, which I write about in The Rest Revolution book, spring is a season of planting new seeds once you've decided during the winter season what you want to grow next, or what you want to keep growing as you start your next chapter.

But today I realized that spring can also be a season to delight in the surprise of new growth from a seed you planted long ago; a seed whose time to grow did not come until now, but whose time has finally come.

Parallels abound in my life right now.

Some seeds I planted for my relationships, my children, and my writing five, ten, and even twenty years ago are finally breaking through the soil.

It is as if the younger me was the truly wiser me, and she planted them back then for such a time as this.

This is, at its core, what The Rest Revolution is asking us to believe: that the seasons when we are not performing or producing are not lost time.

Those seasons are where the work we’ve already done is maturing, waiting for its time to come.

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How We Can Work Together

If you recognize yourself in the burnout cycle, in the unexpanded version of your gifts, or in the midlife professional who needs someone to finally hold space for their nervous system, here’s how we work together:

The PURPOSESCAPING Coaching Intensive — For the high achiever who is done cycling through burnout and ready to package their genius into the next chapter of their life and work. Discuss Your Goals with Me → Book a Call​

Book a Call

Private or Group Sound Bath — House calls, corporate events, retreats, private sessions. I come to you. Inquire About Soundbaths → Request More Info

Let’s Collaborate — Want to write something together or go Live on Substack? Comment below or message me directly.

A true rest revolution starts from within in moments of intentional stillness.

To help you find stillness anytime, I’ve created an accessible way for you to tap into a portal of stillness on the go through The Sanctuary: my new curation of sound and somatic work.

Designed for those who seek both short moments of restoration (think, a guided breathing exercise before a stressful meeting) and the gift of deep rest (a soundbath to lull you gently to sleep), this growing collection is available exclusively to our paid community.

Support my work and explore the power of sound and somatic healing by becoming a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Subscribe now

Can I tell you a funny story about the alarm I set for 4 a.m. the other night?

I had also set one for 5 a.m., just in case I slept through the 4. But I woke up at 6:30 a.m. instead of 4 or 5 in a low-grade panic because I had a speaking engagement in a few hours, and I had not yet finished my remarks.

Now to be clear: I had a loose outline, my frameworks on which the outline was based, my years of expertise, a published book, and a body of work entirely devoted to the very ideas I was being asked to share.

What I did not have was the two or three perfectly organized hours I had mentally allocated for the kind of preparation that would have made me feel sufficiently prepared.

Before setting my alarm for 4 a.m., I’d watched Summer House, told myself I’d prep after the episode, and took a nap instead. I woke up at 6:30 with a little more than an hour to type up my notes before I needed to shower, help get my five-year-old out the door, and somehow become the version of myself I thought I needed to be.

But somewhere between the panic of waking up late and firing up my iPad, something shifted. A kind of calm settled in, and then almost involuntarily, I started laughing. I suddenly understood what had really happened.

God let me oversleep to show me I didn’t need all that time to prepare.

Psychologist Pauline Clance spent years studying 150 high-achieving women and found that no amount of accomplishment resolved their self-doubt. What she identified was a loop: a task triggers anxiety, we over-prepare to manage the anxiety, we succeed, and then we attribute the success to the preparation rather than to our actual ability. So the self-doubt doesn’t dissolve after the win. It compounds in our minds, and next time, we prepare even harder. Clance called it the Impostor Cycle, and she noted that each success becomes “an empty one” because the over-preparation never touches the underlying belief that we are not quite enough.

We — and when I say we, I mean high-achieving elder millennials and Gen X high achievers, women in particular — have a very specific relationship with preparation.

We tend to cross every T and dot every I. We build the deck, write the remarks, and rewrite the remarks over again. Then we lie awake, fretting about the questions that might come up in the Q&A or if the room will have a projector for the slides or not. We obsess over details inside and outside of our control. We treat opportunities to show up in our genius like tests we could still fail if we don’t study enough.

But we also have a very specific and very generational relationship with Clance’s loop. Researchers Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill analyzed data from over 41,000 people across nearly three decades and found that socially prescribed perfectionism — the belief that others demand perfection of you — rose 33% between 1989 and 2016. The people who were teenagers and young adults like me during that climb are now in their late thirties to mid-fifties.

The high-achiever in me was just waking up in 1989.

At the top of that year, I would have been in the second grade, in Mrs. Colon’s class at Rosebank Elementary School in Nashville, Tennessee. It was around that time that I’d discovered I was one of the top students in my class based on how the teacher reacted to my standardized TCAP test scores, my ability to breeze through all of the classwork, and the fact that I got whisked away one half-day each month to participate in “Excel” with the other top students in my class.

The kids who weren’t in the Excel program were always so curious about what we’d been out doing when we’d return from those monthly half days. Why did we get to come to school late? Why was it always the same handful of kids who were absent one morning each month? We kept it mysterious because somehow we knew we shouldn’t talk about it. It was like we were all attending a monthly party they weren’t invited to.

I started paying attention to the way being set apart for achievement made me feel. Getting the right answer felt like a neat party trick and I wanted to keep the party going. My internal perfectionist started waking up inside me just as society’s socially prescribed perfectionism began to push in on me from the outside. I felt the squeeze.

My generation didn’t invent perfectionism, but we were marinated in it during our most formative years. Now we are leading organizations, raising children, and wondering why we can’t stop over-preparing for rooms we have already earned the right to be in.

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But the craziest part in all of this is, our perfectionism isn’t even working.

A 2018 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology examined the actual relationship between perfectionism and job performance and found virtually no relationship.

Perfectionists work harder, stress more, and burn out faster but research shows we do not produce better outcomes. All the crossing of T’s, all the rewritten remarks, none of it moves the performance needle. What it does move is the burnout needle, and it moves it in one direction only.

Cognitive scientist Sian Beilock, now the president of Dartmouth, went further. Her research showed that when people pay too much conscious attention to well-practiced skills, performance actually degrades. Expert golfers who consciously monitored their putting performed worse than those who simply trusted their swing. The most counterintuitive finding, and the most relevant to those of us who have been accumulating expertise for decades, is that the highest-capacity people choke the hardest under the weight of anxious over-monitoring.

The more qualified you are, the more over-preparation costs you.

Research shows the brain performs best when it trusts what it already knows and gets out of its own way.

And yet here I am still setting two alarms.

The organizational psychologist William Schaufeli once wrote that in order to burn out, one first has to be on fire. The most depleted people are the most passionate ones. They’re burning out not from apathy but from caring too much, doing too much, and refusing to trust that what they have is already enough.

Deloitte’s research on working women puts numbers to that fire: among women who regularly work extra hours, only 23% describe their mental health as good, compared to 50% of women who work their contracted hours. Working more is one of the most common expressions of over-preparation, and it cuts women’s positive mental health rate in half.

We are spending the very resource we need most to show up on activities that science says do not improve our showing up.

And here is what all of that preparation is really saying, underneath the performance of it all: You need to be more. You need to be better. You are not good enough as you are.

Is that really preparation, then?

Or is it a very elaborate form of self-doubt dressed up as diligence?

But back to my presentation.

I went and did the talk, and it was great. Amazing, even. And not because I had found a last-minute hour to polish my remarks. It was great because the material is mine and it’s built from real coaching conversations, real experiences, and real women I have sat with while they figured out who they are.

I didn’t need three hours to access that. I needed to get out of my own way long enough to let it flow.

Here’s what I’ve learned in my forty-plus years of being a high achiever: at some point, the preparation becomes its own vehicle of exhaustion. You are not getting sharper, you’re not making things better, you’re just making yourself more tired.

You are wasting precious energy your body and your spirit actually need by pouring it into a version of yourself you think other people require instead of trusting the version of yourself that already exists.

We do not have the energy to spare.

Let's Work Together

I say this as someone who has written an entire book about the ways women’s energy is systematically depleted, and how the demand for it keeps rising while the supply stays low. We cannot afford to exhaust ourselves in the preparation for the showing up.

What would it look like if you took a breath before the big moment and said: I’m prepared for this, and not because I stayed up all night, but because of everything I already am?

If you recognize yourself anywhere in this, most likely you have already done the work. Your years of study, late nights, overextending, and proving yourself are your receipts. You’ve got it. It is already inside you. It is not somewhere in the three hours you think you need to polish the deck, rewrite your outline, or rehearse your lines.

It is, and has always been in you.

The work now is to trust that.

Sources

Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130(4), 701–725.

Beilock, S. L., Carr, T. H., MacMahon, C., & Starkes, J. L. (2002). When paying attention becomes counterproductive: Impact of divided versus skill-focused attention on novice and experienced performance of sensorimotor skills. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 8(1), 6–16.

Clance, P. R., & Imes, S. A. (1978). The impostor phenomenon in high-achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 15(3), 241–247.

Clance, P. R. (1985). The impostor phenomenon: Overcoming the fear that haunts your success. Peachtree Publishers.

Curran, T., & Hill, A. P. (2019). Perfectionism is increasing over time: A meta-analysis of birth cohort differences from 1989 to 2016. Psychological Bulletin, 145(4), 410–429.

Deloitte. (2024). Women @ Work 2024: A global outlook. Deloitte Insights.

Harari, D., Swider, B. W., Steed, L. B., & Breidenthal, A. P. (2018). Is perfect good? A meta-analysis of perfectionism in the workplace. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(10), 1121–1144.

Schaufeli, W. B., Leiter, M. P., & Maslach, C. (2009). Burnout: 35 years of research and practice. Career Development International, 14(3), 204–220.

How We Can Work Together

If you recognize yourself in the burnout cycle, in the unexpanded version of your gifts, or in the midlife professional who needs someone to finally hold space for their nervous system, here’s how we work together:

The PURPOSESCAPING Coaching Intensive — For the high achiever who is done cycling through burnout and ready to package their genius into the next chapter of their life and work. Discuss Your Goals with Me → Book a Call​

Private or Group Sound Bath — House calls, corporate events, retreats, private sessions. I come to you. Inquire About Soundbaths → Request More Info

Book a Call

A true rest revolution starts from within in moments of intentional stillness.

To help you find stillness anytime, I’ve created an accessible way for you to tap into a portal of stillness on the go through The Sanctuary: my new curation of sound and somatic work.

Designed for those who seek both short moments of restoration (think, a guided breathing exercise before a stressful meeting) and the gift of deep rest (a soundbath to lull you gently to sleep), this growing collection is available exclusively to our paid community.

Support my work and explore the power of sound and somatic healing by becoming a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Watch the Full Interview

Most of us have spent years, decades even, building the muscle memory to overwork. We practiced it in high school, pushing past midnight on AP coursework and in our first jobs, staying late to prove we belonged.

Some of us practiced overworking through pregnancies, moves, grief, and every other season that should have asked us to slow down. We practiced it so consistently that overwork got tangled up in our identities.

But we never built the muscle of stillness, so when it came for us through burnout, illness, a new baby, or a changing economy quietly erasing the jobs we’d organized our whole identities around, it felt like a threat.

Our busyness became armor. Because most of us are not busy because we love busyness, we’re busy because we’re terrified of what we’ll find when we stop.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that AI is displacing workers at the exact moment so many of us are already running on empty. Something is shifting. We are in many ways being forced into stillness, not necessarily because we chose it, but because the economy that promised to reward our overwork reneged. The hustle didn’t protect us, and the grind didn’t guarantee our success. What we’re being handed now, whether we wanted it or not, is time.

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What will you do with it?

You don’t build the stillness muscle overnight. You build it the same way you built the overworking muscle: through small, repeated practice. You build it with five minutes of breath before the emails, a journal page before you scroll, and by taking a walk with no podcast, agenda, or optimized outcome.

Now, I’m not going to mislead you. You’ll be bad at it at first. You’ll feel distracted, and you may even try to convince yourself you’re wasting your time.

Do it anyway.

On the other side of that door, once you’ve grown accustomed to the stillness, are the answers you’ve been looking for.

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! This definitely won’t be the last.

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Ready to go deeper?

If you recognize yourself in the burnout cycle, in the unexpanded version of your gifts, or in the midlife professional who needs someone to finally hold space for their nervous system, here’s how we work together:

The Signature Coaching Intensive — For the high achiever who is done cycling through burnout and ready to package their genius into the next chapter of their life and work. Discuss Your Goals with Me → Book a Call​

Private or Group Sound Bath — House calls, corporate events, retreats, private sessions. I come to you. Inquire About Soundbaths → Request More Info

Bring Me to Your Stage — If your audience needs to hear about rest, burnout, and what it actually means to lead from your full capacity, let’s talk. Inquire About Speaking → Book a Call​

Remember: Rest isn’t the reward at the end of the work.

It’s the key to figuring out the work you’re meant to do.

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But now, I find myself in the same boat, asking my first-year college student to think long and hard about what they plan to do with a degree that will likely be worth much less than the multi-six-figure pricetag upon graduation.

I wrote about this in my new personal essay for Business Insider! You can listen to me read the essay in the video, and also read it on the Business Insider site.

Read the Essay

I’m curious.

If you’re in midlife, navigating this particular crossroads with your kids, how are you maneuvering? Do you feel like a dream killer? Or a practical advisor?

How are we doing this?

Also, if you had creative dreams but didn’t come from generational wealth, how did your parents advise you when you were stepping out into the world?

And last but not least…

Have you picked up something in this life stage that you put down decades ago? Is it helping you reclaim your energy?

Let me know.

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Safe Shores is Washington, D.C.’s Children’s Advocacy Center, a non-profit that provides child-centered services for children and families affected by abuse, trauma, and violence, working to prevent and end child abuse through intervention, healing, and prevention programs. They offer a comprehensive, compassionate approach, including forensic interviews, mental health support, crisis assistance, and resources like new clothing and meals, all free of charge. The organization collaborates with law enforcement, legal, and medical agencies to support victims and their families.

Learn more about Safe Shores.

Through this community care series, I provide soundbaths for professionals who work on the frontlines supporting vulnerable members of our community. This work is always a highlight of my month!

Get more from Amanda Miller Littlejohn in the Substack app

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Shortly after I had his little sister, Connor wisely observed my overworking, and the unrealistic demands I was placing on myself. He opened my eyes to my insanity, and I have been changed ever since.

I wrote about this and the close concept of ‘machine mindset’ in The Rest Revolution, but I recently came across a voice memo of myself speaking with Connor in the year after that episode, when my memory of that experience was still so fresh.

Listening to it was like stepping through a doorway back into a mindset I feel fortunate to have outgrown: one that whispered how I wasn’t enough unless I was superhuman.

Like, I took pride in my overdoing. I was proud of how far I could overextend myself; to me, my ability to push through felt like a form of magic.

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Yuck.

I’ve been collecting voice memos of the people I love for years. Some of those people are gone now and I feel fortunate to still be able to listen to their voices. Some of them, like Connor, are still here and have no idea of the wisdom they gave me.

Here’s an intimate moment between me and my son and I recorded in 2022 when he was 14 years old. Pardon the audio quality, it was recorded for my personal archives - not podcast production.

We are in our Washington, DC home in the breakfast nook.

🎙️ On burnout born from the shame of decreased capacity, not seeing your own wisdom clearly and the wisdom kids carry without knowing it

Listen for the moment when Connor says the thing that I as his mother couldn’t say to myself.

Listen for how normalized my overworking mindset was, and even the shame I expressed feeling about having a lower capacity due to my new baby. Listening back now, I am horrified.

But grateful for the growth.

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A true rest revolution starts from within in moments of intentional stillness.

To help you find stillness anytime, I’ve created an accessible way for you to tap into my soundbaths on the go.

The Sanctuary is a new curated library of soundbaths and somatic work, bridging the gap between the studio experience and your private space.

Designed for those who seek both short moments of restoration (think, a guided breathing exercise before a stressful meeting) and the gift of deep rest (a soundbath to lull you gently to sleep), this growing collection is available exclusively to our paid community.

Join us to explore the power of sound and somatic healing.

Upgrade to Unlock

Amanda Miller Littlejohn is the author of The Rest Revolution (Wiley, 2024), a Carter Center mental health reporting fellow, an executive coach and certified sound therapist based in Washington, D.C.

The email hit my inbox on a Friday morning at 8:14 while I was still in my kitchen having my coffee.

I saw my executive coaching client’s name pop up on my screen and opened it before I’d even fully woken up. She’d played volleyball the night before, her first time back in longer than she could remember, and she was sore and happy and already planning to go back.

“You were so right,” she wrote. “I really needed to get back out there to fully connect with my whole self.”

I put the phone down and smiled to myself for a moment.

I had known she needed this. I’d been nudging her toward it for months, with the particular persistence of someone who recognizes in another person the thing she once did to herself. I put the phone down because something in her message landed somewhere personal, the way good news sometimes does when it finds the exact tender spot you didn’t know was still there.

She had come to me months earlier, sharp and capable and quietly depleted in the way that high-achieving women often arrive having optimized everything except the parts of themselves that belong to only them.

She was referred by a mutual friend to me for coaching because, having left the government sector, she was building a new business. This was the kind of business that required so much of her during the building. Her time, her focus, her identity, her weekends. She had given the business most of herself and what was left was running on fumes.

When I begin working with an executive coaching client, we don’t start with goals. We start with story.

My signature process is a deep excavation conducted over two separate two-hour intensive sessions before our formal engagement even begins. I interview the client the way a journalist interviews a subject; I’m trying to get to their recurring themes. I work to dig out the moments that keep showing up across different chapters of their life, the conditions that consistently brought out their best, and the things they loved before the world got loud about what they were supposed to love. By the end of those four hours, I have a portrait of someone’s life that is often more coherent and revealing than anything they’ve been able to see from inside it.

What I found in hers was a woman who had been a leader since before she had the language for it. And one of the earliest places that leadership had lived freely, joyfully, and without the weight of performance or perfection was on a volleyball court.

She had played since she was a girl. It was where she first learned to read a room, to rally a team, and trust her instincts under pressure. It was, she said without quite saying it, the place she had most felt like herself. And then adult life arrived with its real priorities in the form of career ladders and revenue goals and the serious business of being taken seriously, volleyball became something she used to do.

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Over the course of our six months together, I serve as what I think of as the keeper of my clients’ stories. My job is to hold the threads they’ve shared and reflect them back at the moments when they’ve lost the plot, when the pressure of building has caused them to forget who they were before the building started. So when this client came to me depleted and disconnected, wondering why the success she had worked so hard for wasn’t making her feel the way she thought it would, I knew exactly what she needed. I told her to go back to the volleyball court.

Having watched it play out in client after client and lived it in myself: the thing you are most tempted to put down during a hard season is very often the thing that would most sustain you through it.

We treat joy like a reward. We frame it as something to return to once the work is done, once the revenue is stable, once we’ve earned the right to want something just because it makes us feel alive. But joy doesn’t work like that. It is not waiting patiently at the finish line. Joy is fuel. And if you’re trying to run a business or a life and you keep coming up on empty, your joy could be the missing thing to fill your tank.

I know this because I did the other thing for years.

I put down creative writing when I was building my PR business, then again when I was building my coaching practice. I told myself the practical version of the story: no time, no space, the revenue had to come first. And the revenue did come. The business grew. The client roster filled. By every external measure, the exchange made sense. What I didn’t account for was the way I became more efficient and less alive, more productive and less myself.

It wasn’t until the pandemic that I finally picked the writing back up. What I found on the other side of that return was a clarity I could not access from inside the grind. The part of my brain that makes connections, sees patterns, and knows things had been waiting for me in the writing the whole time. No amount of revenue had ever made me feel as alive as working out my thoughts on the page.

This is what I told my client. That volleyball wasn’t a detour from her business. It was a portal back to the version of herself who already knew how to lead. That woman hadn’t disappeared. She had just been waiting to be called back in.

For high-achieving people, the things we abandon in the name of productivity are rarely frivolous. They are almost always the places where our most essential selves live.

The sport. The instrument. The garden. The sketchbook. The dance class we stopped attending when the schedule got too full and the guilt got too complicated.

We file them under someday without noticing that someday is costing us a particular quality of aliveness that makes everything else we do more sustainable.

The midlife restlessness so many of us are feeling right now is a signal. It’s the part of you that remembers who you were before you became so impressively productive, tapping you on the shoulder and asking to be let back in.

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If you’re a high-achieving woman who has lost the thread of yourself inside the building of your career or business, I work with a small number of executive coaching clients each year. Purposescaping, my signature two-session excavation process, is where we begin.

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Amanda Miller Littlejohn is the author of The Rest Revolution (Wiley, 2024), a Carter Center mental health reporting fellow, and a certified sound therapist based in Washington, D.C.

Or if they are able to successfully fall asleep, they struggle to stay asleep. Sometimes when the mind is busy, it keeps the body awake. If you struggle with sleep, try listening to this restorative sound bath—headphones are recommended. Close your eyes and get into a comfortable position, then let your mind drift away to the gentle, calming tones.

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I am standing in my bathroom mirror, twenty minutes before I need to leave for a networking event, watching my silk press give up on me in real time.

The humidity got it. What was sleek and intentional this morning has expanded into something I can only describe as a soft, indignant halo. It’s not terrible, but also not the polished, put-together version of myself I was counting on to walk into a room full of potential clients and make them believe, without question, that I was worth hiring. I stand there looking at my reflection and feel the familiar verdict forming, the one I’ve heard so many times I should have it memorized by now: You don’t look presentable, therefore you can’t go.

So I don’t go. And then, predictably, I spiral.

I have run this particular cycle so many times that I should have been able to set a watch to it. The hair, or the outfit, or the shoes that didn’t match the bag, or the sudden and specific fatigue that arrives precisely when I need to show up — and any one of these things, small on its own, would compound into a reason to cancel. Then came the guilt. Then the depression about the guilt. Then the vague, gnawing feeling that I had once again gotten in my own way.

For years, I called this bad luck. I called it anxiety or being prone to depression. I called it being overwhelmed. What I never called it was what it actually was: data I had refused to use.

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Because I knew my patterns. My hair frizzes on the second day of the silk press unless it’s winter and the air is dry and cold. I knew that rushed mornings activate the old verdict. I had all of this information as I had been collecting it, passively, for decades. I just hadn’t made it useful or built any routines around it.

I kept showing up to the same situations unprepared and genuinely, inexplicably surprised by the same results.

At some point in the last few years, I stopped negotiating with my patterns and started engineering around them. If my hair frizzes on day two, I keep a headwrap I love near the door, or I opt for a natural style. If I have an event coming up and I know that not having the right outfit tends to derail me, I stop leaving it to chance and build a capsule of things I can throw on at a moment’s notice and feel good. If I always feel more tired by the idea of something than by the thing itself, I stop waiting until I feel ready and I build in arrival conditions instead.

This is what I mean when I talk about in The Rest Revolution about becoming a student of yourself. The discipline of taking what you actually know about yourself — your patterns, your limits, your particular brand of sabotage — and designing your life to work with them rather than defaulting, again and again, to everyone else’s rhythm.

Here is what I know to be true about the forties specifically: this is when it all catches up. The years of self-betrayal, the decades of contorting yourself to fit spaces not built for you, and the long habit of making your own needs an afterthought eventually presents its bill.

For many of us, burnout is the accumulated cost of having ignored our own data for a very long time. If you are reading this and you’ve hit a similar wall of running the same cycles and calling it bad luck, I want to ask you gently: what aren’t you giving yourself that you actually need?

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What knowledge of yourself have you had for years, that you keep refusing to use?

There is an additional layer worth naming, one that I am still turning over in my own mind. I read a piece in The Cut recently — “They Thought It Was Burnout or Aging. It Was ADHD” — and it struck a very tender nerve.

I don’t have a formal diagnosis.

What I have is one kid with diagnosed ADHD, one whose symptoms aren’t as severe but are definitely there, and a 5-year-old who is more hyperactive and fidgety than her diagnosed brother was at her age. I have a house full of people who share the same kind of creativity, the same tendency to hyperfocus and then disappear, the same gift for music. It’s nothing for one of us to spontaneously burst into song before all the others chime in, adding our own harmonies and ad-libs to the originator’s nonsensical lyrics.

I’ve gone down enough Instagram rabbit holes to have my suspicions about myself. What I know is that for women who are neurodivergent, whether they have the paperwork or not, midlife and perimenopause don’t just bring the usual turbulence. As estrogen declines, the brain’s ability to regulate dopamine weakens, and the same adrenaline that once helped you push through begins to flood the nervous system instead. The urgency and the overfunctioning that were once the coping mechanisms that carried you through your twenties and thirties stop working, sometimes all at once.

At this age, overfunctioning leads to burnout instead of brilliance.

ADHD, autism, anxiety, or depression that may have been considered subclinical or manageable can leave middle-aged women wondering why their brains suddenly feel like they’re working against them. If that’s you, you’re not alone. Your biology is finally rebelling against your self-sacrificing. This makes the work of becoming a student of yourself an essential midlife survival skill.

Because if you’re a woman of a certain age like me, the specific time and place you were reared in left its mark.

You’ve probably learned to gaslight yourself constantly. You’ve called your own needs unreasonable and picked up unkind labels to describe yourself. You’ve tried to borrow other people’s labels and prescriptions — their morning routines, their systems, their ways of being — because they have the degrees or the revenue, or the picture-perfect life that you don’t, and you decide that makes them more of an expert on you than you are on yourself.

But no one has been inside your specific life, body, or specific exhaustion as long as you have.

It’s time to take the hard-won knowledge you have about yourself and finally put it to use for you.

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Introducing: The Sanctuary

A true rest revolution starts from within in moments of intentional stillness.

To help you find stillness anytime, I’ve created an accessible way for you to tap into my soundbaths on the go.

The Sanctuary is a new curated library of soundbaths and somatic work, bridging the gap between the studio experience and your private space.

Designed for those who seek both short moments of restoration (think, a guided breathing exercise before a stressful meeting) and the gift of deep rest (a soundbath to lull you gently to sleep), this growing collection is available exclusively to our paid community.

Join us to explore the power of sound and somatic healing.

UPGRADE to UNLOCK The Sanctuary

We are working in C and G Major, scales that bring both stability and a sense of ‘uplift.’ Whether you are navigating a season of broadening or a season of refinement, take these 50 minutes to pour back into yourself.

Headphones recomme…

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Headphones recommended. Enjoy.

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I picked up Danielle LaPorte’s The Firestarter Sessions recently — one of my old go-to texts for when I needed a jolt of inspiration. As quickly as the thought surfaced, it fled.

“I’m not the same woman who read that book over ten years ago,” I thought.

Starting a fire in my forties? The kindling is different. And for those of us who’ve spent the better part of a decade stoking flames through sheer force of will, learning to start over with damp wood and less adrenaline is no small thing.

At 33, I was in my “the whole world is before me” Jesus year, and ambition was its own form of fuel. Proving to myself that I could do what I’d never done before created an adrenaline rush that propelled me forward. The accolades, the press, the clients, the praise all put a battery in my back. I was like a little Mrs. Pac-Man gobbling up dots of achievement. I marveled at my own ingenuity. I gloated to myself, if I’m honest, about those stable colleagues, whose slow, steady “good government jobs” suddenly seemed quaint compared to the five-figure months I was pulling in from my laptop in my pajamas if I wanted to.

Could they do that?

I was hustling before hustle culture had a name. Trekking to networking events and industry conferences, exchanging business cards, grinding out of necessity. And when social media arrived and widened our collective aperture on what was possible, it stopped feeling like survival and started feeling like a game.

Suddenly, you could package your genius into an online course, pitch yourself as a speaker, and earn more in an hour than you’d previously made in a month. For those of us on shore when that particular tide came in, livelihood became almost sport.

But the thing about fire and about freedom is: keeping either of them going requires work. Continuous, unrelenting, often invisible work. I didn’t have the full picture at 33. I have a bit more of it now.

And to be honest with you, it made me tired.

After a decade-plus of going full throttle professionally, as a mother, as a brand, as a presence, as a person, I began to settle into a reality that took me completely off guard: the proving had stopped working.

Once I reached my forties, the old kindling wouldn’t catch.

I’d strike the match against the familiar surfaces of the next award, the next client win, or the next brilliant idea, and the fire wouldn’t take.

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Was that aging? Midlife doldrums? Burnout? Depression? Menopause? Some alchemical combination of all five?

I genuinely didn’t know. What I did know was that the ambition that once felt like oxygen suddenly felt like a performance I’d grown too exhausted to sustain.

In my thirties, I used to feel a particular kind of pity for people in stable, predictable work situations. I couldn’t imagine the daily commute and attending to sometimes mindless tasks in exchange for a reliable paycheck every two weeks. Once in my forties, I’d find myself almost envying that ability to check out and collect a check without the performance of it. Without having to be the most brilliant, the most visible, the most “on.” Maybe mindless work to get a check was the true hustle. Or maybe that was my exhaustion talking.

What I know for certain now in my forties is that the high-achiever’s equation of work harder, prove more, earn the right to rest later was always a lie we told ourselves.

I passed it down to my children the way it was passed down to me: encoded in piano lessons and immersion programs, in the way I never truly rested, in the way I wore exhaustion like a merit badge.

The unlearning has been some of the hardest work of my life.

The kindling in my forties is different because I am different. What once caught fire from external praise and proving now asks for something quieter, more interior, and more mine.

The fire is still in me. I just need to learn how to start it differently.

And I believe that willingness to sit with the damp wood a little longer is exactly where a rest revolution begins.

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Help me write the NEXT CHAPTER of The Rest Revolution.

As I curate my ongoing plans, including more content, new soundbath and wellness facilitations, restorative tools, and brand partnerships, I want to ensure everything I create is a true reflection of my community’s needs.

I am committed to bringing you resources that support your wellness and protect your peace as you navigate midlife as a high achiever.

To do that effectively, I need to hear directly from YOU.

Would you spare 3 MINUTES to complete a brief wellness survey?

Your insights will be helpful as I build out my year ahead.

I am incredibly grateful for your time.

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