What If Your Career Is Successful but It’s Burning You Out?
There is a moment in my conversation with career and life design coach Selina Barker when we find ourselves talking about pianos.
Selina is in the middle of a significant career and business transition. After 20 years of helping other people navigate career change, she has found herself questioning the way she has built her own working life. Some of that process has been frightening. At one point, she describes sitting in her garden panicking that her business might be over. But alongside the panic, something else has appeared: space.
She has more time to read. More time to draw. On the morning we recorded our conversation for A Thought I Kept, she had played the piano instead of sitting down immediately to work.
There was something about that detail that stayed with me. Because when we talk about career change, purpose and burnout, we can quickly turn them into another enormous life problem to solve. Should I leave my job? Retrain? Start a business? Find my purpose? Make more money? Make less money but be happier? What am I supposed to be doing with my life? But perhaps there is another question we can ask first.
Where is my energy going, and what is it creating in return?
When the life you created starts to deplete you
Selina’s career crisis didn’t begin because she suddenly stopped loving her work. In many ways, the opposite was true. She still loved coaching. She loved her journals, her membership and helping people flourish. What had become exhausting was everything she believed needed to surround that work.
She talks in our conversation about absorbing a particular story about what being a successful coach should look like: the six-figure business, the big programmes, the marketing, the recognition, perhaps eventually the bestselling book and a place on Oprah’s sofa.
Every industry probably has its own version of that sofa. There are the promotions we’re meant to want, the job titles that demonstrate we are progressing, the businesses that should keep growing, the salaries we should aspire to, the audiences we should build. We can become so accustomed to these measures of career success that we stop noticing whether we ever chose them.
That is where I think burnout and purpose become interesting companions. We often think about burnout as a problem of too much: too much work, too much responsibility, too many demands, too little rest. And of course, sometimes it is. But our conversation made me think about the exhaustion that can also come from spending enormous amounts of energy maintaining a version of success that no longer feels like our own.
You can be very good at something and still not want to keep doing it in the same way.
You can have worked hard to get somewhere and discover you don’t particularly want to stay.
You can even love the essential part of your work while being exhausted by the life you have had to construct around it.
None of those necessarily mean you have chosen the wrong career. But they might mean there is something worth listening to.
Purpose isn’t only about what you do
Purpose is one of the ten pathways to wellbeing we explore at If Lost Start Here and in our new book, and I think we can sometimes make it much grander than it needs to be.
We imagine that finding our purpose means identifying our one great calling. We search for the right job or the right contribution, hoping that once we find it everything will click into place.
Selina’s thought kept offers a slightly different way in. It comes from the writer, philosopher and civil rights leader Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and then go and do that because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Selina first encountered those words more than 20 years ago, when she was at the beginning of her career and deeply concerned with making a difference. She was involved in environmental campaigning and remembers being preoccupied with the question of how she could help save the world.
The problem was that the way she was approaching that purpose was exhausting her.
Thurman’s words gave her permission to turn the question around. What if her own needs, pleasure, joy and fun were allowed to matter too? What if making a difference didn’t require sacrificing herself in the process?
It became one of the guiding ideas of her career. And I think there is something particularly important in that for anyone experiencing burnout, considering a career change or wondering what their life’s work might be.
Purpose doesn’t have to ask only: What useful thing can I do?
It can also ask: What happens to me while I am doing it?
Burnout can become something we simply accept
One of the reasons I wanted to talk to Selina is that burnout comes up so often in the work I do. There is a point at which feeling exhausted and overwhelmed can start to seem almost unremarkable. We talk about dragging ourselves towards the weekend, desperately needing a holiday, being unable to switch off, feeling permanently behind or having nothing left by the end of the working day.
And somewhere along the way, we can start to believe this is simply what having a career, caring about our work and managing an adult life feels like.
Selina pushes against that assumption.
When she wrote Burnt Out, she was interested in the moment when someone reaches the point of thinking: I cannot keep going like this. I cannot cope like this anymore.
Her work also acknowledges that burnout doesn’t always look the same. For some people there is a strong emotional component, particularly when they are continually caring, helping or over-giving. For others, the depletion is mental: endless decisions, problem-solving, worry, household administration, work and the feeling that the brain simply never gets to switch off.
This is especially relevant to the way many women have been taught to think about purpose. Selina talks about the deep cultural programming that can equate being a good woman or a good person with looking after everybody else. Our value becomes attached to how useful we can be, how much we can hold and how little we appear to need ourselves.
Purpose without attention to our own wellbeing can very easily become self-sacrifice.
What if you managed your energy, not only your time?
This is where another of Selina’s ideas becomes useful. While researching Burnt Out, she encountered the idea of managing energy rather than simply managing time. It became a turning point in how she understood burnout: if burnout is an energy crisis, perhaps we need to become much more curious about where our energy comes from, what depletes it and what restores it.
Selina works with five different kinds of energy: physical, emotional, mental, motivational and spiritual.
Physical energy includes both movement and rest. Emotional energy asks us to look after our hearts: feeling our feelings, seeking support when we need it and making room for pleasure, creativity and play. Mental energy requires periods of focus but also genuine opportunities for our minds to switch gears and recover.
Motivational energy brings us particularly close to purpose. It asks bigger questions about our values and the life we are creating, but also what helps us keep moving through the difficult or boring parts of that life.
And spiritual energy is broader than religion or faith. Selina talks about nature, meditation, prayer, ritual and the things that connect us to something beyond our immediate thoughts and to-do lists.
Suddenly, “I don’t have enough energy” becomes a much more interesting statement.
Which energy is depleted? What has been drawing from it? What replenishes it? Is my working life asking too much from one part of me while giving very little back?
Those questions might tell us something that another productivity system cannot.
Career change doesn’t always mean changing everything
I also loved Selina’s honesty about what career change looks like from inside it. At first, she thought everything might need to go. But as she allowed herself to explore that possibility, she began to realise that she didn’t want to abandon the heart of her work at all. The coaching could stay. The journals could stay. The parts that made her feel useful, connected and alive could stay. What needed to change were some of the assumptions surrounding them.
That distinction matters because when we are burnt out or unhappy at work, it is easy to think we have only two options: keep going or blow everything up. Real career change can be much less linear. Sometimes we do need to leave. Sometimes we retrain, change industries, start businesses or close them. But sometimes the external life changes surprisingly little while our relationship with it changes enormously.
The useful question might not immediately be Should I quit my job?
It might be: What is the baby and what is the bathwater?
What is still meaningful here? What am I only doing because I think I should? Which parts of my work give me energy? Which parts continually require me to force myself through them? What version of success am I trying to maintain, and whose definition was it in the first place?
What does success look like when you include yourself?
This might be the question I have thought about most since recording the episode. Selina talks openly about her previous desire for recognition and the realisation that external recognition could become a “hungry ghost”: something she could keep feeding without ever reaching the point where it finally felt like enough.
Her emerging definition of success sounds much simpler. She wants to do work she knows she is good at and that helps other people. She wants to pay her bills and put some money aside. And she wants time to read, draw and play the piano.
When she described it, I remember thinking: Oh. That sounds really good. Not because it should become anybody else’s definition of success, but because it sounded like hers.
Perhaps that is part of our Purpose pathway too. Purpose is not only about discovering what we can contribute to the world. It is also about becoming more discerning about the life we want that contribution to create.
You might want the promotion and the responsibility that comes with it. You might want to build the enormous company. You might want to write the book, change careers, become brilliant at what you do or make a lot of money.
Or you might want enough work, enough money and enough time left over to play the piano.
The important part is noticing whether the definition you are working towards belongs to you.
Start with what makes you come alive
Towards the end of our conversation, I ask Selina what “aliveness” means to her now. Her answer isn't about permanently operating at maximum energy. In fact, it is almost the opposite.
Aliveness, for her, has become connected to presence. Sometimes that means being completely engaged in a conversation or absorbed in meaningful work. Afterwards, it might mean sitting in the garden, putting her feet on the grass, listening to the birds and allowing her energy to shift again. That feels like a much kinder way to think about purpose.
We don't have to find the one thing that will make us leap out of bed every morning for the rest of our lives. We can start by paying attention. Notice the work that absorbs you. Notice the people around whom you feel more yourself. Notice what you are curious about. Notice what leaves you depleted and what restores something in you. Notice where you are forcing and striving. Notice the small things you keep wishing you had more time for. And perhaps notice, too, where your life has slipped onto autopilot.
Because purpose isn't necessarily waiting somewhere outside us to be discovered. Sometimes we find our way towards it by paying closer attention to where our energy already wants to go.
Listen to Selina Barker on A Thought I Kept
In my full conversation with Selina Barker on A Thought I Kept, we explore burnout, career change, energy management, external validation, redefining success and what it might mean to create a working life that supports rather than continually depletes us.
If you are feeling burnt out, questioning your career or simply wondering whether there might be another way to live and work, listen to the full episode: Ask What Makes You Come Alive with Selina Barker.
And if these questions feel particularly close to where you are right now, you don't have to work them out alone. Our coaching sessions can support you through burnout, career change, feeling stuck at work or the bigger question of what you want your life's work to be. Together, we can make space for what you're feeling, understand what is depleting you and begin exploring what you might want to move towards next.