Balance & Beyond Podcast

Burnout doesn't just drain your energy - it shatters your confidence, leaving you disconnected from yourself and questioning who you really are beneath the high-achieving facade.

The real struggle begins after the crash, when you're standing in the rubble of your former identity, wondering how to rebuild without using the same flawed blueprint that broke you.

This deeply personal exploration takes you beyond the clichés of "bouncing back" to reveal what truly happens in the aftermath of burnout. We uncover the painful reality that many ambitious women face: the loss of self-trust, the feeling of disconnection, and the identity freefall that occurs when your sense of self has been so tightly bound to achievement and control. The cycle continues because we keep trying to resurrect our former selves, pushing harder and faster, rather than recognising that a fundamentally different approach is needed.

The path forward isn't found in grand gestures or dramatic life changes, but in three powerful shortcuts that might seem deceptively simple. First, rebuild self-trust through micro-promises that you actually keep. Second, burn the rule book of conditioning that taught you your worth comes from achievement and perfectionism. Finally, create safety in your nervous system, recognising that confidence is a bodily sensation, not an intellectual concept you can think your way back to. This somatic approach explains why so many brilliant women struggle—if thinking alone could solve burnout, your capable mind would have done it already.

Your burnout wasn't a failure; it was the beginning of something true. Start with one promise, one breath, one moment of choosing yourself. It's a commitment you'll never regret. Ready to discover the toolkit that has helped thousands of women create a life of balance? Visit balanceinstitute.com and join our community of women who've learned to define success on their own terms.

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive, and where you have the power to define success on your own terms. I honor the space you’ve created for yourself today, so take a breath, and let's dive right in…

Jo (Host)

Everyone talks about preventing burnout, but what about after the crash? When the energy is gone, the ambitions gone, the confidence you once had is nowhere to be found. This episode is going to share about what happens after the fall and how you start again differently. Burnout doesn't always look like complete collapse and hospitalization. Sometimes burnout can be more subtle.

Your child asking if you can please stop going to work because work makes you grumpy or sick. Or that quiet voice inside you whispering, I can't do this anymore. For so many women, the crash just doesn't happen once. It keeps happening. Sometimes it gets bigger and bigger because they are trying to rebuild using the same rules that broke them. So let's talk about what happens after the crash.

When you burn out, no matter how you've burnt out, your confidence doesn't just fade. It implodes. I want to say if this is happening to you now, as happened to you in the past, you're not being dramatic. You're not weak. You're not broken. You just hit the point where your nervous system, your body and your identity have had enough.

And unless you rebuild differently, your burnout will keep happening just with different job titles or better lipstick. But let's pull back the curtain on what happens to your confidence after the crash. Cause this is something few people have named and I know it's going to make so many women feel seen probably for the first time. First thing that happens after you've burnt out is you stop trusting yourself.

You start second guessing everything. How did I not see this coming? How did I let this happen? How did I miss the signs? Whether it's your decisions, your instincts, even what you want, your desires, you question your judgment, everything. And the part of you that used to be able to move forward, she goes really quiet. Which means it's very, very easy to feel paralyzed. Cause no matter which way you go, self-blame has replaced self-belief.

So you continuously beat yourself up, which of course, erodes your confidence further. And this is why we say burnout ends up being a spiral and it can be really, really hard one to get out of. After you've burnt out, you also are typically very disconnected from what matters. You're disconnected from your goals, your work, the people in your life, yourself. You feel very disconnected from your body.

You often feel numb, whether you're in shock, depending on how bad your burnout's been, you often lose your voice, you can't make decisions and you override most things. You override your boundaries, you override what you've, promises you've made to yourself. And it can look like a variety of levels of collapse. Sometimes it's physical collapse. Sometimes it's emotional collapse.

And sometimes it can be a high functioning burnout episode where you're still going, but you're completely absent. It's almost like you've completely abandoned yourself and now you're just a robot, a machine going through the motions. You're packing lunches and you might be there, but you are not there. You are either daydreaming of escape, of blowing up your life, of giving it all up.

And that is not a healthy place to be because that disconnection fuels even further self-trust, lack of self-trust I should say, and so the cycle continues. And then with no self-trust and complete disconnection, remember you feel numb, you might just feel lots of guilt and shame and very, very low level emotions, is you begin to lose sight of who you thought you were.

This can be literally an identity freefall because it's highly likely that your burnout in some capacity has stripped away the version of you that was successful, capable, respected, who could hold it all, who could do it all. And if your sense of self is very closely tied to your job title or your profession or your industry, then there'd be this big question. Well, who am I? Who am I anymore? What do I want? What do I like?

And especially if not only is your identity tied to work, but your identity is very much built around being in control. Whether it's being a get shit done person, being on top of things, holding all the balls, the moment you lose that control, whether it's of your body or you've had to take a break off work or you've lost control of your emotions that normally you're very good at keeping zipped up behind a steel reinforced damn wall.

This crash leaves you standing in the rubble of the identity that you built for yourself. So this regaining of confidence is a journey, but it's not about bounce backs or self-clear cliches. They are not going to work.

What I need you to know is you have to rebuild from a different place, not from sand. Because the reason too many women burn out again and again is that they go back to thinking that they have to be who they were. So they go back and they try to do it all again, but they're going to do it better, faster, harder, more hustling. And of course, all that happens is the burnout episodes continue. Maybe you change your job because you tell yourself it's the industry. Maybe you change up your home circumstances or you change up your financial situation.

None of that is going to change you. Because at this point, after you've burnt out, this becomes your line in the sand moment. It's the one where you decide the old version of confidence, the one that required sacrificing yourself, has to stay buried. In that moment, you decide to rise differently. Not harder, not faster, but more truthfully.

Now this rebirth, your Phoenix moment, to get your confidence back and to rebuild is not going to be fast. But today I want to share with you some significant shortcuts, but they're only going to work if you stop chasing the version of confidence that broke you in the first place. Now I need to preface these three with saying they might sound easy and you're going to go, oh, that's too simple, Jo. What are you talking about?

But I promise you, I have worked with over 500 women in very, very close proximity, all who have burnt out in some capacity. And these three shortcuts are more powerful than you could ever imagine. The first shortcut to rebuilding back your confidence is to start keeping small promises to yourself.

The antidote to broken self-trust isn't grand gestures. It's micro repair. It's micro dose. At this point in time, you've lost all faith in yourself and you're usually paralyzed. So taking a big step or a grand gesture is going to fall flat. And if you do, it's going to be so laced with fear that it's going to be impossible to find any good in it. These micro repairs is one little boundary. I'm going to bed at nine o'clock tonight.

It's one little walk that you do for yourself. It's one, no, I'm not going to have that extra cookie if that's what you actually want. And every time you honor your word to yourself, your confidence quietly builds. Cause that's what eroded it in the first place. It wasn't usually one grandiose big mistake or one huge failure. It was millions of micro abandonments that eventually became too much.

So it's not going to be regained by that big decision, a resignation letter. I'm taking six months off. I'm going to have a career pivot. I'm going to pack up my life and live out of a van and write a book for the next 12 months. It all sounds well and good and it makes a great movie, but it's not going to bring your confidence back. Those big changes that you may or may not decide to make completely your call.

They're only going to stick after you've rebuilt trust with yourself in the small, quiet ways. So it's little micro yeses that mean the world.

Your second shortcut after you are starting to every single day, little tiny pieces of trust is you need to let go of the old rules that burnt you out. What burnt you out fundamentally underlying beliefs where you have to be the best, be perfect, do more because you don't think that you're good enough. So you have to do everything and work really hard to prove that you are.

That belief system is what broke you. Confidence will not come from hustling back to those beliefs, pushing, grinding. Confidence is going to come from admitting the truth that that wasn't the real you anyway. Those beliefs, while they feel as true as the world is round and the sky is blue, those beliefs were given to you.

They were conditioned in to you. So there's not really who you are. You may not be an introvert. You may just be somebody who wanted to hide away from the world because you didn't feel safe. You may not be a perfectionist because maybe you're an innovator, but you were told that the only way to survive was to be good. These tiny specks of self abandonment that have happened over decades is what has gradually disconnected you from who you really are.

And those specs started really early as young as two or three. So you've got decades and decades of self abandonment, but those rules were not yours. You have to decide that you're going to burn those rules. I'm not saying you're going to become mediocre. I'm not going to say you're not going to have a hard work ethic or you're not going to be a high achiever.

You can still be those things, but not based on the old rules, not based on conditioning, not based on fundamentally not being good enough. And so therefore I have to do all these things to try to prove to myself and you that I.

And then finally, after you've started to build your micro trust and you've made a decision to burn those rules, that version of you has gone, you have to create safety in your nervous system first. Usually it's your nervous system that burns you out. Eventually it just says, I've been whispering, I've been throwing rocks and now I'm going to hit you with a giant boulder. And eventually you're going to have to listen to me.

You cannot think your way back to confidence. I'm to say that again for the people in the back who were multitasking and listening to this on 2x speed. You cannot think your way to confidence. Confidence is a feeling that lives in the body. You need stillness, you need breath, you need to reconnect from your body and defrost from the complete numbing that is likely taken over your life.

A system that is stuck in fight or flight cannot be confidence. You might appear confident, you might appear arrogant, you might appear aggressive, but they are all coming from a nervous system that is wired for survival. That can only last so long, just like your system can only have so much cortisol, it can only have so much adrenaline before something has to break and for it to find its homeostasis. It has to find its new normal.

Only once you get to that point can you start to build confidence back in your body one piece at a time? It's for this specific reason that I have somatic coaches on my team. Because if you knew how to think you had a confidence, you would have mantra-ed it, you would have done it already with all the knowledge you have, with all the capability that you have, with all the networks, and you would have found a way to make yourself more confident. But it doesn't work that way.

We put too much precedence and importance on our brain when in fact it is overrun by our nervous system more often than we realize. So this is the ultimate hack and the ultimate shortcut. Learning to cultivate nervous system safety that is aligned with a new you. The real you, not the you that was based on output or your qualifications or external validation.

That was the initial way your nervous system has been wired to believe that it's safe. You have to unwind all that. We have to break all those patterns and rebuild it now in a way that's true to who you really are, to who the you is underneath. And if you're sitting here feeling burnt out or have been at that point of complete disconnection, the thought of rediscovering who you are is terrifying because it's buried.

You probably don't even know, can't even remember a time when you did something that you really wanted because you've spent your entire life doing things you should, doing things that you think you should or things that you think people think you should. It's exhausting. And your brain is going, I'm done. I'm out learning to discover who you are because this is a process. You don't just flick a switch and all this is the real me. You are a very, very complicated onion.

Taking off these layers will be the best thing you ever do for yourself. I have never ever had a woman come into my programs and go through this journey in whatever capacity with me and not come out the other side and go, wow, I was carrying around so much armor and it's really heavy. Wow, it's easier to be me. It doesn't take as much energy. I'm actually happy. I'm more joyful. Yeah.

Because all the armor, all the shooting, all the obligation, all the guilt, all the shame drains you. And there's a reason that you end up usually being afflicted with some kind of dis-ease because your nervous system is no longer at ease. These are the shortcuts that change everything. And this is something that so many women, when they get to this point of burnout, there's this big cloak on the other side.

It's like, how do I even get to find a way out? Is there even a pathway out for me? But it's important you know that there is, there is a pathway. If you feel like your confidence is at zero, it doesn't mean you failed. It means the old system failed you. And the crash, it's the beginning, not the end. Burnout is brutal.

I know from firsthand experience, but it's also clarifying. It shows what can never come with you again. So let this be your call to rebuild differently, slowly, honestly, and without apology. Start with one promise, one breath, one moment of choosing you. It's a promise you'll never regret.