Burnt out. Overwhelmed. Running on empty and not entirely sure how you got here? It’s one of those things that creeps up slowly and then suddenly you’re in it, wondering why the usual fixes aren’t fixing ANYTHING.
Most conversations about burnout stop at the surface. Too much on the plate. Not enough sleep. Overcommitted and under-rested. All are very true. But in our experience, that’s rarely where the real answer lives.
In episode 2 of Built to Last, we get into exactly that.
What’s actually driving burnout, what we’ve had to unlearn ourselves and some honest, actionable steps you can start with, including what it might mean to let a few things go.
More Isn’t the Problem
The people who are most depleted aren’t always the ones doing the most. More often, they’re doing things that were never really theirs to do in the first place. And that’s true whether you’re a woman running a business, a man leading a team, or anyone quietly carrying more than their share and not entirely sure why.
Fear of judgment is running more of the show than most people want to acknowledge. Not from people who are genuinely invested in your life. From a family member, a school friend you barely speak to anymore, someone on social media who has no real stake in what you do. And yet their imagined opinion shapes decisions every single day.
It shows up in ways that don’t feel small. Not asking for help because of how it might look. Following a path in business, career or life because that’s the order things are supposed to go in. Saying yes when every part of you is saying NO.
For women, Kate sees this constantly: the pressure to hold everything together, to be available to everyone, to never be the one who drops the ball.
For men, Adrian sees it differently but just as often: the pressure to keep providing, keep performing, stay in the fight no matter what.
There’s a lot of noise out there telling us what we need and the ‘shoulds’. Most of us need far less of it.
“We actually need so much less. There’s the fear of judgment, there’s the overwhelm from thinking we need more than we actually do.” – Kate Addamo
But underneath the fear and the noise is something more fundamental – not knowing what you actually value. When that’s genuinely unclear, boundaries don’t come naturally. Yes becomes the default. Worth gets measured by how appreciated you are, how needed you are and how much you’re producing for other people. Not by the things that actually fulfil you and most of the time, there hasn’t even been space to figure out what those things are.
What We Were Never Taught
Think about what you wanted to be when you grew up. It doesn’t matter what the answer was. What matters is what all those answers have in common. They’re about work identity. From the time we were five, seven or fifteen years old, every question and every decision pointed in one direction. What will you do? What will you become?
We spend twenty to thirty years building a very clear picture of ourselves from a work perspective and then life shifts, roles change, responsibilities stack up and that same clarity was never built around who you are beyond what you do.
What matters to you? How do you want to live? What kind of person do you actually want to be?
When we don’t have that, identity stays tied to output. Worth gets measured by how much you produce, how much you provide and how available you are to everyone around you. The specific pressure looks different depending on who you are and how you were raised but the pattern is the same.
We were all asked what we wanted to be. Nobody asked us who.
Ask anyone who’s running close to empty what they do for fun. Really ask. The pause is always the same. A blank stare. “I’m not sure”. “I have no idea”. And that silence is telling. Because burnout isn’t always about what you’re doing too much of. Sometimes, it’s that there just isn’t enough joy in the picture. Not enough of what actually fills you up. That absence is its own kind of depletion and it doesn’t get talked about enough.
Unlearning the Version You Were Given
So much of the pushing through comes from a version of success that was handed to us rather than chosen. Keep growing, keep hustling, get the better car, the bigger business, the more impressive life and don’t stop or you’ll fall behind.
We’ve both had to do a lot of unlearning here. Success now looks like a Friday lunch when we’re both home. It looks like no more than ten weeks of work at a time without a week off. Six weeks off at Christmas time. A calendar that gets planned in advance.
That’s not scaling back ambition. That’s building something that can actually hold.
The shift that makes this possible is also a practical one. A lot of the anxiety around taking a break, or stepping back, or saying no to the next thing, comes from not having a clear picture of the finances.
When you don’t know what’s coming in and what’s going out, you feel like you can’t afford to pause even when you can. Getting that visibility changes the whole conversation. It moves from can’t to can.
Earlier this year, we had eight launches planned between November and March. We were excited about all of it, but we also didn’t catch the warning signs quickly enough. Eventually, we pulled the pin on a few things because we could feel what was building and we knew that we had to prioritise our health and the things that mattered most to us in this season, rather than pushing things that don’t feel right just right now.
That recognition, being able to catch it before it catches you, is something you develop over time. But it starts with being willing to look!
“If you don’t have a light at the end of the tunnel, how can you really say you’re working and performing at your best?” – Adrian Addamo
Give Yourself PERMISSION
Something comes up again and again in these conversations we have with our clients (and even ourselves!) and it doesn’t get spoken about enough.
People don’t take the break because they don’t think they’re allowed to. They don’t ask for support because of how it might look. They keep going because they’ve internalised the message that their value is tied to being available, to staying in the fight, to not letting go.
And sometimes what actually shifts things is as simple as someone saying: it’s okay. Book it. You’re allowed to do this for yourself.
The relief on people’s faces in that moment is real. Messages come back after saying “Thank you for making me go. I can’t remember the last time my partner and I had that kind of space together.” That’s not a small thing. That’s someone finally giving themselves permission to live differently and feeling what that actually feels like.
Start Here
Your body knows before your mind does. That feeling when you’re about to say yes to something and you already feel the weight of it, that’s information.
Honouring that feeling is one of the most significant things you can do because every time you override what you actually feel to manage someone else’s experience of you, you’re quietly reinforcing the belief that what you feel doesn’t matter enough to act on.
Start with learning to hear the NO. And from there, get specific about what you actually value. Not in an abstract way. Concretely.
What does a good week feel like?
What does success feel like from the inside?
Once that’s clear, the choices become clearer. The boundaries stop feeling like conflict and start feeling like clarity.
And be honest about what’s on the list that doesn’t need to be yours. What can be delegated, outsourced or dropped entirely? Not as a permanent state, but for this season. What would give you back enough space to think?
None of this happens overnight. We’re still doing the work ourselves, but it does start somewhere, usually not by adding something but by taking something away and making more room for the things that are genuinely yours.
One honest decision in the right direction. That’s where it begins.
Listen to Episode 02, Burnout. The Root Cause Nobody’s Talking About, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Until next time,
