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

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]

“I want you to forcibly slow yourself down,” says Cait on this #straightfromcait episode of FRIED where she offers three tips—and a special bonus—to help you create more ease throughout your day, without taking away from any of your responsibilities or plans. These are short, simple yet effective ways to check in with yourself physically, mentally and emotionally to eliminate unnecessary tension and make life’s tasks more bearable.

Cait will share which parts of the body to focus on to lower your overall stress response and signal to your vagus nerve that you’re OK. She’ll explain why slow grooming reminds us that we’re safe and how we can cut down on the false sense of urgency that drives most of us throughout our days.

Life is busy, and no one can expect to be relaxed all day every day. But taking a few extra minutes to incorporate these tips into your daily routine will do wonders to make you feel more relaxed, at peace and at ease as you tackle your tasks.

Quotes

• “With only those three things, you will create more ease throughout the course of your day, and you will be signaling to your vagus nerve that you’re OK, that you’re getting through the day, and you’re not adding any extra tension where it’s not necessary so this will lower and damper your stress response over all.” (1:42 | Cait Donovan)
• “When you take those extra few minutes to slowly groom yourself, you are giving your central nervous system a signal that you’re safe and OK because you can’t groom when you’re in danger.” (3:09 | Cait Donovan)
• “Not every task is going to feel wonderful and I’m not asking you to make it feel wonderful, but what if you could take just a few moments to turn on the Spotify playlist that you love that makes you feel good while you are folding and putting away laundry.” (4:23 | Cait Donovan)
• “Because so many of us function with this really false sense of urgency in every single task we do, I want you to forcibly slow yourself down.” (5:05 | Cait Donovan)

Connect:

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]

“What am I doing? I’m performing for other people,” says Rochelle Younan-Montgomery, published author, keynote speaker and founder and CEO of The Reset. In the wake of a physically and emotionally agonizing miscarriage, Rochelle attempted to override her grief by powering through at work. Like so many who experience burnout, she felt her worth was tied to her productivity and performance, and today on FRIED she discusses how she learned to overcome that mindset, as well as how it was shaped by religion, racism and growing up in an immigrant family.

Rochelle discusses how she learned to listen to her body's cues as a means of gaging a misalignment with her authenticity and soul's purpose. She talks about knowing when it's time to stop excavating and to start putting knowledge into practice. She also shares her "Open the Front Door" framework for entering into discussions that prevent the build up of resentment and allows both parties to be heard and to set clear boundaries.

Join today's discussion to learn what Rochelle has learned from her years of deep spiritual work as well as from her yoga practice.

Quotes

• “I thought I could power through. I thought, ‘No, I’ve got this. I’ve held a lot in the past. I’m good. I’ll show up. Work matters most. Productivity matters most. I have responsibilities. I can grieve quietly and secretly. I had a male boss, so I didn’t feel safe to share with him.” (7:10 | Rochelle Younan-Montgomery)
• “And then it just became clear, ‘What am I doing? I’m performing for other people. I’m performing like this, ‘I’ve got my shit together,’ kind of person that can handle anything. What is that saying, especially to my daughter? What message does that send that I don’t deserve time and space to grieve and for my body to heal?” (8:21 | Rochelle Young-Montgomery)
• “I don’t have time and energy nor do I want to choose to override my body and mind and spirit anymore because my family and my kids and my well-being matter more to me than performing and being perfect and showing up as ’the strong leader.’” (9:50 | Rochelle Younan-Montgomery)
• “When I don’t feel authentic, when I don’t feel like I’m in my truth, my body tells me. And I, for a long time, have not been in tune with my body, so looking back, I can look at that situation more clearly now. At the time, I just felt, ‘Oh, maybe I’m a little bit nervous because I’m doing something in front of a group.’ But that’s never been an issue for me, I love having a captive audience. It’s more about—now, looking back I can see—oh, prayer, in that way, felt like I was maybe lying. Something felt disingenuous and my body was screaming trying to tell me, ‘What are we doing here? Do we really believe this?’” (19:22 | Rochelle Younan-Montgomery)

Links

Connect with Rochelle Younan-Montgomery:

https://www.rochelleym.com

https://www.instagram.com/the_reset_by_ro/

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

https://www.rochelleym.com/download

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

“Spoiler alert: You’re not stuck. There’s always something you can do,” explains today’s guest Erica Rooney, keynote speaker, highly-sought after executive coach and author of the best-selling book, “Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors,” the latter of which, she explains, are the limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors that keep so many of us from moving forward and reaching our goals and potential. On today’s episode of FRIED, Erica joins host Cait Donovan to discuss the fear of asking for help, the fallout within a generation of women who were raised to believe they can have it all, and why, for most of us, burnout started before we even reached the age of five.

Like so many women, Erica was “working like she didn’t have kids and parenting like she didn’t have a job,” and turned to alcohol to cope with the never-ending list of “shoulds” she kept piling onto herself. She and Cait discuss the parallels between addiction–so much of which is not to substances but feelings and expectations—and burnout. Erica discusses her SNAP method, a four-step science-backed framework to help you become more aware of your body’s signals, to ask yourself the tough yet important questions and to pivot into a new and more productive mindset.

Join today to learn the mentality that makes Cait want to kick people in the teeth—with love—and how to choose a better way of thinking.

Quotes

• “The core of the problem wasn’t my corporate job, it wasn’t anything external. The core was within my own expectations and what I felt I had to do. No one else was putting those expectations on me.” (5:43 | Erica Rooney)
• “There’s a very similar stigma that we’re holding onto with addiction, alcoholism and also with burnout because burnout often feels like, ‘Well, I should have made better choices, I should have done something differently.’...Burnout is not your fault. This shit started way before your burnout happened. If you’ve burnt out in your life, let me promise you that that shit started before you were five.” (12:42 | Caitlin Donovan)
• “Addiction is so much more than substance. Absolutely agree with that because when I think back on the things that just fueled me up, kind of like that first sip of wine—yes, here we go—it would be a raise, a new job, a new title. ‘Oh, I’m being sent to France for work. Look at me. Look at my fabulous life.’...it is very, very addictive to be able to call people and, ‘Oh, what’s going on with your life?’ Oh, I just got promoted to this.’ And it’s all crap. (20:40 | Caitlin Donovan and Erica Rooney)
• “I recognize that the system is the problem. The system is the problem but what I know about changing systems is it takes generations and generations. And we are changing the system, we are, but it will not be at the level that I want it to be until I get six feet under the ground. So, for me, I thought, ‘What can I do? What can I do? There’s got to be something that I can do, not to change the system, but for my own self, so that I don’t have to be person experiencing all these gaps.’” (30:24 | Erica Rooney and Caitlin Donovan)

Links

Connect with Erica Rooney:

https://www.ericaandersonrooney.com

https://www.instagram.com/ericaandersonrooney/

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

https://ericaandersonrooney.myflodesk.com/

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

“Your biology could be working against you,” says host Cait Donovan, when it comes to your ability to foster a hopeful and positive mindset. As it turns out, those with adverse childhood experiences (ACE) can lack the brain plasticity necessary to adopt a new growth mindset. Luckily, you have the power to change this and in this episode of FRIED, Cait shows you how.

She shares the three steps necessary to bolster and support yourself in order to enable the process. She reiterates once again why safety is the building block to resilience, change and burnout recovery, and the importance of movement, sleep, proper nutrition and hydration.

The body and the brain are more interconnected than we tend to recognize in Western culture. Join today’s FRIED episode to use that connection to foster, rather than hinder, growth and recovery.

Quotes

• “The idea is if you could just get more growth mindset, then your brain will respond and everything will work swimmingly. But Chinese medicine philosophy taught me to look at bodily systems and how we function in the world and how we behave a little differently than how it’s taught in the West. Things are more connected, more interwoven, less separate and there’s an emphasis on the fact that most causes could be effects and vice versa. And also, a cause might only have an effect if there’s an underlying, pre-existing risk factor.” (1:20 (Caitlin Donovan)
• “The questions we need to be asking are, “Why are some people able to access hope more easily than others? Why do some people react to stress in different ways than others? What are the pre-existing factors over the course of someone’s life that allows them to create a more hopeful outlook or mindset? Are there biological factors that support hope? Are there biological factors that impede hope? Are there biological factors that support positive mindsets or that impede positive mindsets? What I’m looking to explain is that there is more to positive mindset than just deciding to think differently and then think differently.” (4:02 | Caitlin Donovan)
• “Your brain cannot change, you do not grow courage, nothing happens until your body feels safe. Your nervous system doesn’t create more resilience, your Vagas nerve doesn’t tone—none of the things that all the people are talking about when it comes to burnout recovery happen unless your feelings of safety are improved.” (10: 40 | Caitlin Donovan)

Links

https://www.friedtheburnoutpodcast.com/post/jeff-harry-leave-your-serious-grownup-behind-and-heal-your-burnt-out-brain-through-play

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm