Should You Stay or Should You Go? The 3-Question Burnout Test for Leaders

You worked hard to get good at this job. Now you can do the quarterly report in your sleep, the pay is fine, and everybody says must be nice. So why are you so restless? In this episode, I'm talking through what boredom research says about work that got too easy and work that stopped meaning anything to you, why boredom at a decent job is so easy to brush off, and the honeymoon-hangover effect that makes every new job feel exciting for a while. I'll also talk about deep generalists, and what...

Why does leaving a job feel like leaving your people? Your team knows your coffee order, and the group chat has jokes nobody else would get. For a lot of us, work has become the main place we feel like we belong, and that makes a draining job a whole lot harder to leave. In this episode, I'm talking about the need to belong, what the Surgeon General's 2023 loneliness advisory says about how much connection has shrunk outside of work, why managers hand more unpaid work to the employees they se...

Employee benefits are supposed to support you, but that promise falls apart when nobody explains what you have or how to use it. In this episode, I’m talking with Gayle Martin, founder of TrueNorth Benefits Strategy, who spent 27 years in group benefits before leaving corporate leadership and building a people-first consulting practice. We talk about why benefits alone won’t keep employees, how culture and communication determine whether a plan helps anyone, and what to look for when you’re ...

Why do you stay in a job you already know isn’t working? Staying comes with a paycheck, benefits, a routine, and problems you already understand. Leaving comes with questions your brain can’t answer yet. That difference can make a draining job feel safer than an uncertain next move. In this episode, I’m talking through status quo bias, loss aversion, sunk cost, and the identity wrapped up in your work. You’ll learn why burnout makes career decisions harder, how familiarity starts making the...

What happens when the career you thought you wanted starts costing too much of yourself? In this episode, I’m joined by Kelly Wuest, founder of Kelly Wuest Consulting and one of my closest grad school friends, for a conversation about burnout, career pivots, transferable skills, and building work that actually fits your life. Kelly shares how she moved from higher ed to nonprofit work, then from nonprofit leadership into entrepreneurship. We talk about the identity hit that comes with leavi...