“It's 7am on Wednesday and I've already worked 25 hours this week.”

“I'm doing the bare minimum everywhere. Just spinning each plate enough that nothing falls.”

If you've had any version of those, you're not looking for a productivity system. You already have systems. That's rather the problem.

What's actually going on

You're not failing at any of it. You're doing all of it, adequately, at a cost nobody has itemised — least of all you. The competence is real. So is what it's taking.

Underneath, there's usually a sentence most women have never said out loud:

“I'm not safe unless I'm in control. I have to push through and I cannot stop.”

You learned that because it worked. Being the reliable one kept you employed, promoted, or left alone. So you got good at it. Very good.

The trouble is it doesn't switch off when you get home. And nothing in the design of your week ever accounted for what it costs to run it.

And the tell that it's gone too far usually isn't the tiredness. It's this:

“I've lost my creativity, and that's how I know I'm not back to normal.“

Nobody warns you about the going-flat. You brace for exhaustion. You don't expect to just stop having ideas.

What the work is

Not resilience training. You are already, demonstrably, extremely resilient. That's what got you here, and more of it is the last thing you need.

What we do instead: work out what's actually yours to carry, and what you picked up because someone else needed you to. Then rebuild so your capability stops costing you your health, your creativity, or your ability to trust your own read on things.

Six sessions, one to one, virtual, across twelve weeks. Fortnightly rather than weekly — partly because you don't have a spare hour a week, and partly because the gap is where the work actually happens.

Session 1: The Load Audit

The first thing you do, before you change anything, is map every demand in the system: who issued it, who benefits, who's actually carrying it. You do that first, because until you can see the structure, every problem looks like a people problem.

Nobody does this for you.

We do it here. Not to make the load lighter — I can't lift it and I won't pretend I can — but so you can finally see where each piece came from. Some of it was issued to you. Some you absorbed from a culture that never asked permission. A small amount is genuinely yours. You can't tell those apart by thinking about it, so we don't; we put it on the table where you can see it.

If you've been to one of my retreats, you've done a compressed version of this in a room with ten other women. This is the same instrument with the lid off — your actual calendar, your actual job, your actual family, over twelve weeks rather than forty minutes.

Session 2: What's actually yours

Using iDiscover, a values-mapping tool I'm accredited in, we get underneath the load to what you actually value — not what you've been rewarded for valuing. Most people can't separate the two. This is the session where that starts to come apart.

Sessions 3 to 6: Built around what we find

Most coaching starts by asking what you want out of it. That's a hard question to answer honestly when you've spent a decade wanting what you were supposed to want. The first two sessions are what let you answer it properly.

From there I draw on ICF coaching, burnout-specific tools and iDiscover — whichever combination gets you to what you came for. Some of it is conversation. Some of it is the practical mechanics of downregulating a body that's been in fifth gear for a decade.

What it costs

I'll tell you on our first call. That call is a conversation, not a pitch — if we're not a fit, I'll say so, and tell you where I'd point you instead.

What it isn't

It isn't therapy, and I'll tell you if that's what you actually need. It isn't a promise that you'll leave your job, or that you won't. It isn't a framework that ends with you being told the answer was inside you all along.

You will not be asked to be grateful, positive, or ready.

Who I am, briefly

Fifteen years in corporate change and transformation, at Director level — which means I spent a long time learning to read exactly where a system was quietly extracting more than it gave back, and how to name that clearly to the people carrying it.

I burned out inside that system in 2020, which is the part that isn't on my CV.

ICF-credentialed coach (ACC) · Qualified burnout coach · 500-hour yoga teacher · Host of the Successful AF podcast · Coaching since 2021

"Coaching has given me much more self belief, and a much deeper understanding of my own values and drivers. What's been even better is comments from my colleagues and family — really positive feedback from my manager and my peers on how I now hold myself in meetings."

— Coaching client, Head of Ethics & Sustainability