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