Burnout Trauma and Bold Ambitions: Transforming Overwork into Sustainable Success
When Success Feels Scary: My Journey from Paralysis to Purpose
I've pushed myself to breaking point so many times in my career that when my business finally started making big money, instead of feeling thrilled, I felt a creeping dread.
My revenue was growing, my programmes were fully booked—everything that supposedly measured "success" was ticking upward.
Yet underneath, I was feeling queasy.
Each new client enquiry, each uptick in revenue triggered waves of anxiety.
My old patterns of burnout haunted me.
I didn't trust myself to handle more success without falling back into those destructive cycles.
Despite healing from the physical symptoms of burnout, my body and nervous system remembered. It showed up as procrastination, as holding back, as a constant background whisper of: "What if you can’t handle this? If you take on more, you'll break again."
Looking back now, I realise my experience isn't unique.
So many women I work with feel this tension between their boldest ambitions and the fear of burning out again.
For some, it manifests as ‘self-sabotage’—missing deadlines, procrastinating on launching offerings, spinning their wheels, staying invisible when they long to be seen.
For others, it emerges as physical symptoms like headaches, digestive issues, or sleepless nights.
The Painful Disconnect: Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up
Much of this tension arises from a fundamental disconnect between our minds and our bodies—a clash between top-down and bottom-up processes.
Top-down processes come from the mind's expectations, plans, and goals. These are the "shoulds" that tell us to strive harder, do more, and aim bigger. But our minds are often out of touch with our bodies' current capacity, so filled with other people’s ideas, expectations and society’s conditioning!
Bottom-up processes, on the other hand, are rooted in the body's felt sense of safety, readiness and pleasure. They reflect the nervous system's feedback: "This is too much," or "Not like this!"
When ignored, these signals manifest as self-sabotage, anxiety, or even physical illness—not because we lack ambition, skills or the ability to achieve great things, but because our bodies are protecting us from overwhelm, misalignment and depletion.
Conventional wisdom tells us to override these bottom-up signals, labelling them as ‘mindset blocks’ to be pushed through.
But I've learned that these signals are our deeper intelligence communicating to us. They're not barriers—they're guides showing us the way in which we can sustainably expand.
Honouring the Body: Expanding Capacity from the Inside Out
The key to sustainable success isn't to silence these signals but to honour them. It's about working in harmony with both mind and body, integrating our ambitions with our capacity.
For me, this took over a year of gentle experimenting.
I needed to learn how to make decisions from this deeper place - not just from my ambitious mind, but from my whole system.
I started paying attention to how different levels of income and visibility felt in my body.
When a launch or program went well, instead of rushing to the next thing, I'd pause to let the success land.
I began tracking not just my financial metrics but my whole experience - my energy levels, my sleep, my ability to be present with loved ones, my creative flow.
I call this somatic success.
And I discovered that when I listened to this intelligence, my capacity naturally began to expand.
The procrastination eased. The dread lifted. I found myself able to hold more - more clients, more income, more impact, more visibility - because I was moving at a pace and in the way my whole system could handle.
The Dance Between Desire and Capacity
This delicate dance between desire and capacity is at the heart of my work with clients.
Together, we navigate their dreams and create sustainable structures that support expansion without overwhelm.
We learn to:
- Feel safer with bigger goals, income, expression and visibility
- Build resilience to handle attention and increased responsibility
- Honour the nervous system's feedback as a source of wisdom, not weakness
My approach helps women design their own sustainable systems to balance ambition with capacity. We explore practical strategies like setting clear boundaries, creating buffer time, and practising mindful pauses in the week, season, year - to integrate growth.
Our dreams show us the direction we're headed. Our bodies show us the pace and style in which we can travel.
When we honour both, the gap between desire and capacity becomes a space for creativity, alignment, and sustainable growth.
What would it look like to align your ambitions with your body's capacity?
To honour both the top-down drive of your mind and the bottom-up signals from your body?
Your most meaningful success isn't in pushing harder—it's in listening deeply. When mind and body work together, remarkable things become possible.
This is your invitation to embrace that space and redefine what success looks and feels like for you!
Come join me for Time Alchemy this January if this is the journey you are called to in 2025. This is the foundation I wish I had had and so created for myself!! All the details to sign up are here:
