The Job That Breaks You May Not Be the Job That Caused Your Burnout

At the beginning of this year, I burned out.

From the outside, it would have been easy to connect that burnout to the event immediately preceding it: I lost my job during a large organizational downsizing.

Cause. Effect. A clean, understandable story.

Except that was not the whole story.

The job loss was the final blow, but the injuries had accumulated across several years and several workplaces. I had moved from one difficult environment into another without giving myself enough time to understand what each experience had taken from me.

I kept going because I could.

More truthfully, I kept going because I had to.

I am a single mother with three children and a mortgage. My responsibilities did not disappear because I was emotionally exhausted. My nervous system did not receive paid leave from parenting, groceries, bills, or the need to create safety for my family. I could not live on the unemployment benefits alone.

So I did what many capable people do.

I functioned.

Functioning is not the same as healing

Years earlier, I had held a senior leadership position in an organization where I was asked to participate in practices that violated my integrity.

When financial pressure increased, leaders were expected to build cases against people rather than speak honestly about what was happening. Employees became costs to remove, and managers were expected to help create the justification.

At first, I attempted to follow the direction I had been given. Then I saw the human consequences more clearly.

I saw the fear.

I saw people questioning their worth.

I saw the damage extend beyond employment and into people’s health, families, and ability to trust themselves.

Eventually, I refused to participate.

The organization then turned some of those same mechanisms toward me. I left with my professional identity shaken and my voice restricted. I knew that I had acted according to my values, but knowing that intellectually did not immediately repair what the experience had done to me.

I did not stop to heal.

I found another job.

The next environment was not the same, but it was not right for me either. There was a mismatch in values, leadership, and psychological safety. I still did meaningful work. My teams still benefited from my leadership. I continued showing up, solving problems, supporting people, and producing results.

That became evidence to everyone around me that I was okay.

It even became evidence to me.

But competence can hide an enormous amount of pain.

Eventually, I moved again, believing I was finally entering a safer chapter. Instead, I began recognizing familiar patterns. I challenged behavior that I believed was harmful. Then, after only seven months, I was included in a large layoff.

That was when my body stopped negotiating with me.

The grief of one job loss opened the door to years of accumulated exhaustion, betrayal, moral injury, and suppressed anger.

I did not burn out because I was weak.

I burned out because I had been strong for too long without enough safety, recovery, or protection.

Sometimes the dragon waits until the danger has passed

We often imagine burnout as a dragon roaring in the middle of the crisis.

Sometimes it does.

But sometimes the burnout dragon remains silent while we are surviving. It helps us wake up, attend the meeting, reassure the team, write the strategy, care for the children, and send another application.

It whispers:

Keep moving.

You can collapse later.

People are depending on you.

This is not the time.

That dragon is not our enemy. It is trying to keep us alive, employed, capable, and needed.

But “later” eventually arrives.

At the beginning of this year, I suddenly had something I had not allowed myself before: time.

I had several months of financial protection following the layoff. On paper, it looked like an extraordinary opportunity. I could finally dedicate myself fully to Avagasso. I could write, build, teach, coach, and turn years of leadership experience into the business I had imagined.

It was almost like having an investor pay for six months of creative freedom.

And I could barely do anything.

I could not write.

I could not build.

I canceled a 6-month run of the Leadership Landing Program because I knew I did not have the capacity to hold that space responsibly.

When I attended an existing coaching engagement, I could be completely present for the person in front of me. Then I might need days to recover from the energy it required.

I had been given time, but my body did not use that time to produce.

It used that time to collapse.

For a while, I judged myself for this. Why could I not take advantage of the opportunity in front of me? Why could I lead through extraordinary complexity for other people but not make myself open a document?

The answer was uncomfortable:

Rest was not interrupting my purpose.

Rest had become my purpose.

Your newest employee may still be surviving their previous workplace

Eventually, financial reality required me to work again.

I returned to a professional environment before every part of me felt completely restored. Like many people beginning a new role after a painful experience, I needed to communicate:

You made the right decision by hiring me.

I am capable.

I am ready.

I belong here.

People do this every day.

They arrive at onboarding with a polished introduction while privately rebuilding their confidence.

They participate enthusiastically while watching leaders for signs of danger.

They receive ordinary feedback, but their nervous system hears the echo of an earlier humiliation.

They hesitate to trust promises because another organization made similar promises before breaking them.

Leaders see competence and assume recovery.

They see productivity and assume safety.

They see someone smiling and assume the past has been left behind.

But a new employment contract does not erase an old wound.

A healthy culture can support healing, but it cannot demand that healing happen on schedule.

Sometimes safety initially feels suspicious. When someone has learned that belonging can disappear suddenly, calm does not always produce immediate calm. They may remain cautious, hypervigilant, or unusually eager to prove their value.

That does not necessarily make them difficult.

It may mean they are still discovering whether your organization’s safety is real.

Burnout rarely belongs to one moment

Organizations prefer simple explanations.

They allow us to locate burnout inside an individual or a single event:

They could not handle the pressure.

They struggled with resilience.

The layoff affected them badly.

They should have taken more responsibility for their well-being.

But burnout can be cumulative.

It may contain years of:

🖤 Values being compromised

🖤 Harmful behavior being normalized

🖤 Boundaries being punished

🖤 Concerns being dismissed

🖤 Reorganizations and layoffs

🖤 Leaders demanding loyalty without offering protection

🖤 Continually performing strength while privately deteriorating

🖤 Moving into the next role because stopping is financially impossible

The final event may not be the largest injury.

It may simply be the moment when the person has nothing left with which to absorb it.

This is why leaders must be careful when they celebrate resilience without examining what resilience is costing someone.

Some people look resilient because they are supported.

Others look resilient because they do not believe they are allowed to fall.

Those are not the same thing.

What responsible leaders can do

You cannot heal every wound people carry into your organization. Nor should leaders become therapists.

But you can stop making people prove that their pain is legitimate before responding with humanity.

You can:

❤️‍🔥 Create clarity instead of allowing uncertainty to become chronic fear.

❤️‍🔥 Address harmful behavior before people must sacrifice their health to challenge it.

❤️‍🔥 Make disagreement safe, particularly when someone raises an ethical concern.

❤️‍🔥 Avoid treating constant availability as commitment.

❤️‍🔥 Recognize that a strong performance may coexist with profound exhaustion.

❤️‍🔥 Ask people what they need to thrive instead of deciding for them.

❤️‍🔥 Build trust through consistent behavior rather than inspirational promises.

❤️‍🔥 Give people room to rebuild confidence without permanently lowering your expectations of their potential.

Most importantly, do not make people choose between integrity and belonging.

That choice leaves wounds that can travel with them long after they leave your organization.

I am not where I was at the beginning of the year

Today, I feel peaceful again.

Not because every part of my career is perfectly aligned. Not because I have answered every question about what comes next. And not because healing followed a neat six-month project plan with measurable deliverables.

I feel peaceful because I finally stopped demanding that my pain justify its timeline.

I gave myself permission not to turn recovery into another performance.

Slowly, words returned.

Curiosity returned.

My desire to write returned.

My desire to teach returned.

Most importantly, my ability to hold space for others returned, not from the place of forcing myself to be strong, but from feeling grounded enough to stand beside them.

Perhaps I am fully healed. Perhaps another layer will reveal itself later.

I no longer need to assign recovery a percentage.

Healing is not a progress bar.

And functioning is not proof that the work is finished.

So when someone in your team continues delivering through enormous difficulty, do not only admire their strength.

Ask what that strength is protecting.

Ask what it is costing.

Ask whether they feel safe enough to put it down.

And as leaders, we must be willing to ask those same questions of ourselves.

What are we still carrying?

Which behaviors helped us survive but now limit how we connect, influence, and lead?

Which inner dragons are protecting old wounds long after the original danger has passed?

This is the deeper work we explore inside the Leadership Landing Program.

Leadership Landing is not a quick collection of management techniques. It is a months-long guided journey into the human being beneath the leadership role: our behaviors, convictions, values, protective patterns, relationships, goals, and the life we genuinely want to create.

Together, we learn to recognize the difference between leading from grounded strength and performing strength because we are afraid to stop. We develop the self-awareness to understand our dragons, the courage to shift the cycles that no longer serve us, and the influence to create safer, more human environments for others.

The next six-month Leadership Landing journey begins in January. https://www.theleadershiplanding.com/

If you are ready to stop measuring yourself only by how much you can carry and begin discovering who you can become when you finally put some of it down, I would love to welcome you around the campfire. 💚🔥🐲