You Are Not A Frog

If you’ve ever plucked up the courage to have ‘that’ conversation, and planned it carefully so that you can be kind and clear - but two minutes in, it goes south - you’ll know what it feels like when their face changes, your chest gets tight, and suddenly you're both defensive and you’re both feeling got at. This replay from January 2025 is part of our season on conflict and difficult conversation...

Have you ever laid awake replaying a conversation with a tricky colleague, wondering if you were the one completely out of order? If you're a high achiever in a leadership role, you know the dilemma - you don't want to be the bad guy, so you avoid the awkward chat, pick up everyone else's slack, and say yes when you mean no. Then it leaks out at the worst possible moment. In this fun episode I pla...

Have you ever felt ashamed or frustrated that you didn't know the answer? Not to a clinical question, but about your own life - what's next, what's wrong, why you feel the way you do? If you're the one everyone relies on, not knowing can feel like failing at the one thing you're supposed to be good at. This is a replay from 2024 I'm bringing back while I’m writing my book ‘How to Say No When Someo...

You may think you're fine. You're still performing well at work, still the one people rely on, yet you know something's off. In this episode - a replay of one of my most important conversations from 2025, I share the question that changed how I think about burnout: What are you borrowing from your life to keep your work looking fine? For many of us, our ingrained programming tells us we have to pl...

You tell yourself that never letting anyone down is how you protect the people you love. But our ingrained programming tells us we have to please everyone all the time to feel good enough - and the people you love are the people who suffer most when you're stuck in the Responsibility Trap. They get the tired, thin version of you. If you lie awake worried you've upset someone, or feel guilty for sa...

Do you lie awake replaying a decision you had to make? That work anxiety loop where you can't stop thinking about work even when you are home? Maybe you've told yourself burnout is just the occupational hazard of this job. You've tried to put things in place — to leave on time, to say no more often — and you just can't seem to hold them. What if you are solving the wrong problem? It's not a work s...

Note: This is a re-release of one of our most-listened to episodes — originally recorded Autumn 2025. We've given it a new edit because it's more relevant than ever. If you know you need to do something about how you're feeling — but you keep telling yourself "not yet" — this is for you. We are very good at spotting danger in other people. Sepsis, red flags, a patient or client deteriorating. We a...

Every high-achieving leader has a to-do list that doesn't end — it just refills. And the only response most of us were ever handed for that is push harder. Grip tighter. Muscle through. In this episode, Rachel talks to Ellen Coomber, co-founder of the Softness Revolution, about why that instinct — the one we were trained into from exams onward — stops working, and what she does instead. Ellen has...

Nearly one in three people who take time off for burnout are off again within a year - and over half of them work in healthcare. This episode is about why that keeps happening, and it isn't because anyone's weak. You go back to the same poisoned water, you carry the same responsibility you carried before, and now there's something extra on top of it - a shame tax, the pressure to prove you're fine...

There's a project you've been meaning to start, a conversation you've been meaning to have, or a change you've been meaning to make. You know that you can do it, but what you can't quite find is the moment, the time, or the right conditions…and so it waits. Robbie Swale is a coach and author who has spent years thinking about why capable, intelligent, hard-working people don't start the things the...

Most of us were taught that having limits is a weakness - something to push through, not something to honour. And if you're a doctor, a nurse, a vet, or anyone in a high-stakes role, that message arrived early and arrived hard. The result is a profession full of people operating at full stretch capacity without realising it, because full stretch became the new normal so gradually that we stopped n...

Most of us have been told that burnout is caused by overwork and that the solution is to rest, take a break or slow down. Set some boundaries. But what if that's only part of the picture? What if the very thing that made you good at your job - your values, your drive, your commitment to never letting anyone down - is exactly what keeps burning you out? And what if rest, on its own, isn't enough to...

Every doctor and high-achieving professional knows what it feels like to lie awake with a brain that refuses to stop - replaying a decision made that afternoon, running tomorrow's list at midnight, scanning ahead for what might go wrong. Our ingrained programming tells us that more thinking keeps us safe and keeps things running. But there is a cost to that, and our analytical brains (the very thi...

Boundaries aren't walls. They're fences. A wall keeps everyone out. A fence has a gate, and it's yours to open or close, if you're willing to hold it when someone pushes. That idea comes from this conversation with Dr Sarah Coope, recorded for the Your Coaching Journey podcast. Sarah talks about her own route into coaching, what twenty years of coaching doctors has taught her about self-worth, and...

There is one belief that keeps high achievers stuck in burnout long after they should be recovering - the belief that burning out means they failed. This is a live panel discussion from the Burnout Free Working Conference — an unscripted conversation about what burnout recovery actually requires, why the self-blame makes it impossible to start, and the single reframe that changes how you see every...

There's something most leaders do - we avoid the conversation that needs to be had. We care too much about the wrong things: how the other person will react, whether it will make things awkward, whether we'll be the one blamed if they go off sick. Our ingrained programming tells us that keeping the peace is the same as keeping the relationship, but it isn't. In this episode, Joe Weston is back for...

A doctor emailed me recently, she's been in medicine for 25 years, and the question she asked was one I've heard in a hundred different ways: "Am I a snowflake?" She felt a great deal of shame about finding things hard - something I see time and time again in high achievers. Like the feeling that not coping is proof of something wrong with you. A character flaw. A sign you've gone soft. But the da...

When Aoife O'Brien is close to burnout, she doesn't want to stop. She wants to do more. One more task. One more thing to get through before she can stop. She says that's how she knows now - not the exhaustion, not the breaking point, but the acceleration. If you recognise that feeling, this conversation names what's actually happening. Not to add to your list. To give you a cleaner way to read wha...

You may have been counting down to summer all year, telling yourself that you just need to survive until your next holiday. You may have been looking forward to taking a pause and getting a chance to finally breathe. But when you get to your holiday, instead of feeling rested, you feel more exhausted, more overwhelmed, and more behind. And somewhere underneath the busyness, you might be thinking:...

If you've always felt like everyone else got an unwritten handbook about how to behave at work - and you've had to figure it out yourself, one interaction at a time - this episode is for you. This week, Rachel’s in conversation with Kirstie Pickles: vet, autistic ADHD professional, and EDI advocate. Kirstie was diagnosed as an adult - after years of masking in a high-stakes clinical role, performi...

Burnout in high stress jobs isn't always about doing too much; sometimes it's about a belief you were never taught to question. You finished your day, finished (most) of your tasks, and you still can't switch off. Most people assume that's a workload problem, but the reason people in demanding roles like medicine can't genuinely rest isn't about how much they've done - it's about what they've been...

Getting a complaint from a colleague is one of the most destabilising things that can happen to a high-achieving leader. Not because of the process, but because of what it makes you ask about yourself. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Pallavi Bradshaw, Medical Director at the MPS, to talk about something that doesn't get named nearly enough: a complaint from a colleague isn't a patient or client...

Imposter syndrome is something we often don’t talk about openly, and the standard advice - build your confidence, reframe your thinking, remember your achievements – rarely addresses the real cause. In this Quick Dip, Rachel shares a piece of feedback she received years ago that still stings and uses it to unpick what imposter syndrome really is: it’s not a confidence gap, it’s not a skills defici...

If you constantly find yourself picking up tasks that nobody else will do, staying late to cover gaps, or slowly absorbing more and more without anyone asking you to - this episode is going to name exactly what's happening. Occupational psychologist Leanne Elliott joins Rachel to unpack why over-responsibility isn't a personality flaw; it's what happens when you don’t have absolute clarity on what...

You know something needs to change, but you just have no idea what, how, or where to begin, and your lack of a plan may be starting to feel like failure. In this Quick Dip, Rachel unpacks why the belief that you need everything mapped out before you're allowed to move is the very thing keeping you stuck, and introduces the AB-Z method: a simple framework that replaces the impossible task of knowin...