Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Burnout recovery doesn’t happen all at once. Small steps add up, even when progress feels impossible.

Hey Fried fam! Ever looked back at an old journal entry or email and realized you were clearer on what you needed than you thought? In this episode, Sarah Vosen walks through a listener’s raw, unfiltered reflection from a time when burnout had them feeling stuck, exhausted, and unsure how to move forward.

What can you do when you know what you want but can’t see a way to get there? Sarah explores how small shifts, support, and patience can turn overwhelm into real progress. She shares insights from her own recovery and the power of recognizing the wins, even the tiny ones.

Burnout can make change feel impossible, but what if you’re already on your way? Tune in for an episode that will help you see the progress you’ve made and remind you that healing is within reach!

Episode Breakdown:

00:00 Introduction

05:04 Reflecting on Burnout and Desires

08:28 Initial Steps in Burnout Recovery

09:45 Fajardo Method and Nervous System Healing

10:51 Working While Recovering

12:05 Moving and Major Life Changes

13:00 Current Work and Practice

14:09 Achievements and Progress

15:02 Enjoying Nature and Retreats

15:56 Family and Boundaries

17:01 Letting Go of Control

18:07 Physical Health Improvements

18:59 Reflecting on Progress

20:04 Writing Your Burnout Story

21:08 Self-Compassion and Validation

22:22 Burnout Web of Causation Guide

25:03 Encouragement and Support Options

Links

Join us on February 26 for "Understanding Where Your Burnout Came From," [https://bit.ly/burnoutweb25] a live, interactive workshop where we can take the first step to untangle your burnout knot—together.

We’ll be working through The Burnout Web of Causation, a tool designed to help you:

- See the bigger picture of what’s contributing to your burnout.

- Identify the stressors you can control—and the ones you can’t.

- Take practical steps to start cutting the threads of burnout, one by one.

REMEMBER: Burnout Recovery works better with support.

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Burnout thrives in the spaces where people aren’t saying what they really mean.

In this episode, Cait Donovan is joined by Nahal Yousefian, a former head of HR at Netflix, to talk about why work culture fuels burnout and what needs to change. Nahal shares how burnout hit her hard—so hard she physically couldn’t move—and why that moment forced her to rethink everything.

Nahal pulls back the curtain on corporate dysfunction, from empty jargon to leadership that talks in circles. Why are companies obsessed with being “strategic” while refusing to make clear decisions? Why does psychological safety feel like a buzzword instead of a real priority? And what happens when employees finally get tired of playing along?

This episode cuts through the noise and makes the case for honest conversations, smarter work structures, and a workplace where well-being isn’t treated like an afterthought.

Quotes

• “The leader was talking about apples, the employees talking about oranges, and HR is in the middle trying to get them to see that they’re talking about two different things.” (16:16 | Nahal Yousefian)
• “I think after 20 years in the business, which was last summer, I started to realize that with the coming up of AI and the sort of technology and the social media platforms and avenues, I think that I would be able to exact change faster coming out than being inside a corporation.” (10:11 | Nahal Yousefian)
• “In a day and age where generations coming into the workplace are demanding authenticity, corporate jargon has gone even more on steroids than ever before.” (22:33| Nahal Yousefian)
• “If you look at the numbers, it’s a mathematical game where the number of managers who will judge you for asking questions versus the ones that won’t. We tend to go with the 80-20 rule. We know 20% of the managers are going to create a fair environment and I’m scared to ask questions, but 80% are okay. But because of that 20%, the employees reporting to the other 80% don’t do it either. So I think that’s the dynamic that we need to shift.” (28:44 | Nahal Yousefian)
• “Following your heart is burnout prevention and burnout recovery. It’s one of the rare things that fits in both categories.” (58:32 | Cait Donovan)

Links

Connect with Nahal Yousefian:

www.thebarraisers.com

https://www.instagram.com/thebarraisers?igsh=Y3BhZTh4cTd4NW1k&utm_source=qr

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nahalyousefian/

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Burnout is more than feeling tired. It’s a challenge that affects every aspect of life, especially for healthcare professionals. In this episode, Dr. Jessi Gold shares her deeply personal experience navigating burnout as a psychiatrist during the pandemic, and offers a rare glimpse into the struggles even experts face.

What can we do when the very systems designed to support us become the cause of our suffering? Dr. Gold and Cait Donovan explore the systemic issues in healthcare that perpetuate burnout, from overwork to the culture of self-neglect ingrained in medical training. They also discuss how small shifts—like embracing vulnerability and prioritizing self-care—can make a meaningful difference, even in a broken system.

How can we address burnout without blaming individuals for their struggles? Dr. Gold and Cait’s discussion invites you to rethink how we approach burnout, recovery, and the collective responsibility to create healthier environments.

Quotes

• “As a psychiatrist who is an expert in burnout, I have an extra added layer of fun to this story, which is that I see people all day and tell them they’re burnt out and don’t necessarily apply the same thing to myself.” (04:32 | Dr. Jessi Gold)
• “It’s so hard to admit that something like work or systems at work could make you feel ill. I feel like it’s so much easier to be like, it just made me tired, but it didn’t actually hurt me in some way that needs to be replenished or fixed or whatever.” (14:21 | Dr. Jessi Gold)
• “Our culture is a culture of silence and shame. Most of us are struggling and don’t mention that we’re struggling. And if we knew other people were struggling, even a little bit, we would open up to them more and feel safer in our culture.” (42:42 | Dr. Jessi Gold)
• “If someone said this job is really, really hard emotionally, physically, every other thing that you can think of, and it will impact you, and you will burn out from it. And as a result, you need to take care of yourself in the process. I would have been like, ‘Oh, okay.’” (43:53 | Dr. Jessi Gold)
• “The second I started to burn out, that’s what went, right? Like, the second that I was not okay, like, to a more extreme extent, I was not treating patients the way that I would want them to be treated, right? As humans.” (50:42 | Dr. Jessi Gold)

Links

Connect with Dr. Jessi Gold:

https://www.drjessigold.com/

https://www.instagram.com/drjessigold/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessi-gold-md-ms-14844bb/

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

“Don’t shame your limitations.” Cait Donovan and Sarah Vosen share this piece of wisdom in this #FRIEDfam episode, weaving together lessons from their community and their own experiences to explore self-compassion and meaningful burnout recovery.

How often do we forget to listen to ourselves, honor our limitations, or simplify our approach to recovery? Cait and Sarah remind us that true healing comes with self-compassion, small steps, and leaning into support when we need it most.

Join Cait and Sarah to discover practical tips, heartfelt stories, and the collective wisdom that can guide your path to a more sustainable and fulfilling recovery.

Quotes

• “We’re going to start with one of my favorites that came from Chandra Dorsett. And she said four simple words. And these words, when I read them, punched me right in the gut. She said, ‘Don’t shame your limitations.’” (02:19 | Cait Donovan)
• “Stop trying to work so hard on getting better that it becomes a new source of stress, and learn to embrace the wayward journey of recovery.” (05:29 | Cait Donovan)
• “There is not one right way to do anything. There is a right way for you.” (18:03 | Sarah Vosen)
• “My friend Lauren Baptiste said—and she’s been on the podcast before—she said, ‘Your drive for excellence isn’t keeping you excellent, it’s keeping you exhausted.” (24:28 | Cait Donovan)
• “This is a fellow burnout expert, Natalia Saman, who said, ‘The purpose of self-care is to reduce stress. If your nails look great, but you’re still buried under a pile of work, a pedicure wasn’t the self-care you needed. You needed boundaries.’” (25:37 | Cait Donovan)
• “Self-care is self-care if you feel cared for when you do it or after it’s done.” (27:14 | Sarah Vosen)

Links

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

“This isn’t some soft skill, or a ‘nice-to-have.’ It’s a must-have,” says Jennifer Moss, workplace strategist, co-founder of The Workplace Institute, and author of award-winning books on leadership. Her latest book, “Why Are We Here?,” discusses how we can use hope as an operational strategy at work, how employees can learn to bring their whole, best selves to work by meting out goals in small steps and celebrating each small win en route to the larger goal. Leaders, in turn, can learn to, rather than mitigate those efforts, be conduits to employees’ mental health, in part by being encouraging and being receptive to employee feedback.

This isn’t about drumming up toxic positivity but creating a safe and openly communicative environment, which is more easily said than done when employees feel, even subconsciously, that their freedoms are being taken away and that promises have been repeatedly broken. Jennifer and host Cait Donovan discuss how to foster trust between leaders and employees and how caring for oneself creates a feeling of safety—starting at a physical level—which is the first step in opening up lines of communication, and facilitating what Jennifer calls “a culture of positive gossip.”

As many as seventy percent of employees report that their managers make or break their attitude toward their jobs. Join today’s episode of FRIED to learn how to introduce a hope-based strategy into your own work environment.

Quotes

• “We can help our employees have quick wins every day, celebrate the smaller wins, recognize that we spend a lot of time lately only celebrating and rewarding and recognizing the big project end goals, not realizing that the day-to-day ennui, the day-to-day tedium is what is burning people out. And if we just made these goals more incremental — it’s actually how you support young kids, especially kids who are neurodivergent—you chunk out the goals and adults need those same inspirational ways of working, and that’s how we make hope a strategy.” (12:29 | Jennifer Moss)
• “That’s where we make hope a strategy and operationalize hope. It’s first recognizing that it isn’t some sort of soft skill or a “nice-to-have,’ it’s a ‘must-have,’ that it’s real. The military abides by this rule, and it can be operationalized on a day-to-day engagement in our work and in our employees’ tasks.” (13:10 | Jennifer Moss)
• “You can be highly passionate about what you do, and highly driven and care about your organization and…highly engaged, but you can be similarly at the same stage of burnout. And if we can’t talk about those things, no one will know, and that’s when people quit, that’s when people hit the wall. It’s where everything just ends.” (24:33 | Jennifer Moss)
• “We are subconsciously rebelling because our freedoms are being taken away and we’re not necessarily aware of why we feel this dissonance.” (33:51 | Jennifer Moss)

Links

Connect with Jennifer Moss:

https://www.jennifer-moss.com/

https://www.instagram.com/betterworkinstitute/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenleighmoss/

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

“We’re at a time when things are going to be shifting and changing,” says host Cait Donovan who, on this solo episode of FRIED, shares a workplace forecast for 2025 and explains what business leaders can do to best navigate this new landscape, rocky as it’s predicted to be. Today, Cait shares findings from a number of experts, including the future of DEI initiatives, how AI will affect employee benefits’ packages, which position on the corporate ladder will likely burn out en masse and what leaders can do now to best mitigate the fallout. She also discusses the increasing opportunities for freelancers as more and more workplaces continue to embrace flexible work.

It’s not enough, she explains, to prevent the workplace environment—and the burnout that transpires therein—from becoming worse. Steps need to be put in place to actually make things better. Employers must be trauma-informed, to create psychological safety and transparency in the workplace, and in turn, employees need to be especially transparent and communicative about what they really need and want from their jobs.

Join Cait to learn more about what to expect in the year ahead and how to continue championing employee wellness throughout 2025.

Quotes

• “We can approach DEI practices through the lens of biology and physiology. So, I believe that the biology of belonging and the biology of psychological safety really roots the things we need for real true DEI overall into a science-based model that helps people feel a little more grounded in the approach and makes people less likely to have bad reactions to it.” (1:47 | Cait Donovan)
• “The reason that I think it’s important for them to be burnout-informed is because we can’t shift things in the culture to protect people if we don’t know what the risks are. And I think, we can’t really also create a positive culture without knowing which things make a negative culture.” (4:14 | Cait Donovan)
• “I think this is going to be probably a little bit messy to start out, but longterm, I think everything is getting more customized. Medicine is getting more customized, jobs are getting more customized. So, I do think this is the way of the future, I just think we need to be really careful, very inclusive, very transparent, and very clear about our intentions as we’re doing this, so we don’t create more problems as we go.” (6:50 | Cait Donovan)
• “I think we need to really be focused on that mid-level manager and their well-being because that’s where a lot of the well-being of the company spreads from.” (8:13 | Cait Donovan)
• “We’re going to have to make people more comfortable around change. We’re going to have to create a different level of psychological safety so that change can actually be absorbed and actually dealt with.” (9:33 | Cait Donovan)

Links

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

“People leave the field not because they don’t love the work, but the confines of the work structure make it impossible for them to do it,” says Regan Parker, Chief Legal and Public Affairs officer for Shift Key, a technology marketplace that connects licensed independent healthcare professionals with facilities who need their services. As healthcare workers continue to feel overworked and undervalued, they continue to burn out, leaving healthcare facilities with staffing shortages. By allowing professionals to set their own rates and to select work on a shift-by-shift basis, Shift Key’s model offers the flexibility and autonomy to maintain a work/life balance. It also provides relief from the expectations of a traditional employee’s schedule, while providing similar relief to company teams who are understaffed and thus at equal risk of burnout.

On today’s episode of FRIED, Regan joins host Cait Donovan to discuss why this approach to work—which is gaining traction across all sectors—is especially helpful for those who are natural caregivers and nurturers and, as a result, don’t have the most business acumen or are even sure they should be charging for their work at all. The two discuss the importance of offering per diem workers a social safety net and protections under the law which, at least in the U.S., have traditionally only been offered to a company’s employees.

Join today’s discussion to learn why Shift Key’s system is the future of work and how it could be game-changing to a number of professions.

Quotes

• “At my very first marketplace company, I got to see how technology could enable people to work on their own terms, and the people that that impacts the most are moms, caregivers, people with disabilities, people who can’t work in a traditional setting, who really need flexibility and autonomy and choice. So, I saw the ability for technology to connect those parties to work.” (4:08 | Regan Parker)
• “When you understand the humanity of how certain aspects of the healthcare system currently works and how that impacts the person, their home life, how they feel, how they’re able to perform their work, it really changes the conversation in a way that I think was important.” (5:05 | Regan Parker)
• “The reason people leave the field is not because they don’t love the work. They love the work. These are people who get into it because they want to care for people. They care about keeping people healthy and safe and heard, but it’s the confines of the work structure that make it impossible for them to do that.” (6:08 | Regan Parker)
• “I was always turned off by the notion that anybody would ever incentivize a race to the bottom. ‘How cheap can we get that one task to be?’” (20:58 | Regan Parker)

Links

Connect with Regan Parker:

www.shiftkey.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/regan-parker-58ab531a

https://www.shiftkey.com/trends

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm