Avery – 00:01

Hi, I’m Avery Thatcher, a former ICU nurse, and this is not your standard stress management podcast where we just focus on those band-aid solutions like the benefits of meditation, mindfulness, and self-care.

You already know that you need some kind of recovery strategy to deal with your stressful life.

But what you may not know are all of the sneaky ways that society, our upbringing and our high achieving nature, and so many other factors contribute to our risk of burnout.

That, my friend, is what we talk about here on this podcast because you can’t do something about a situation that you’re not aware of, right?

So if you’re ready to get out of the pattern of burning out, feeling better, only to burn out again, it’s time for us to shed the light on the truth about burnout.

All right, so today we have Lindsay with us, which I’m really excited about because we have something in common.

We live relatively close to each other in the same city, which is kind of cool, right?

Avery – 01:02

Especially in this internet world where I could be talking to somebody in New Zealand and who knows?

So yeah, it’s really cool that you’re close to home.

So tell us a little bit about you.

Lindsay – 01:13

Yeah, so I am the founder of High Voltage Leadership.

I am a leadership and executive coach as well as being a people strategy expert and I work a lot with female entrepreneurs and small business owners helping them build, grow and then really lead exceptionally well Teams in their business and so combines both of my incredible passions and skill sets

around coaching leaders to be really impactful and authentic and also to grow workplace cultures where people can perform at their very best and feel like they belong.

Avery – 01:56

Which sounds amazing.

And it also sounds like you’re waving the high achiever flag over there.

Lindsay – 02:02

Yeah, for sure.

Avery – 02:03

So tell me, when did you first realize you were a high achiever?

Lindsay – 02:08

Yeah, I think, you know, it’s something that I’ve recognized in myself from pretty early on.

I was always that kid that wanted the gold star on the chart.

I was always that kid that wanted to get really great marks in school.

I always was the leader of every team, every group.

I always wanted things to be perfect and would get really frustrated when they weren’t like that.

So it’s something that’s, you know, come, I would tell you probably from the time I was in grade school.

Absolutely.

Avery – 02:57

And I think a lot of the people listening and like you listening right now, you might be able to relate to that.

It’s one of the things we talk about a lot on this is that hindsight is a jerk and sometimes you can look back and be like, oh, it started back then.

I wish I knew that I could start to work with it rather than have it drive the bus all the time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How did you feel like your high achiever drove the bus when you moved into adulthood?

Lindsay – 03:24

Yeah, I think for me as a grown-up, you know, there have been, what my high achiever does in particular is just drives me to work harder and harder and harder.

Generally, 95% of the time that has absolutely paid off.

I can work my way out of just about every situation.

I think one of the most important and impactful places where my high achiever did me a really significant disservice was in my first marriage.

So I got married and had a baby very early in my 20s.

And I worked and worked and worked at a marriage that was never going to work.

My first husband was an alcoholic.

Lindsay – 04:07

I was just never going to be able to fix that.

But because my high achiever had always enabled me to just work harder and get the payoff, I completely overexerted myself in that relationship and it took a lot and for me to attend Al-Anon meetings, you know, to really come to grips with the fact that I couldn’t own that and I couldn’t fix that.

So that was, you know, that was probably the first and most, one of the most impactful experiences in my early adult years.

I mean at 21, you know, you’re technically an adult but But are you really?

Yeah, it doesn’t feel like it at the time, does it?

I don’t really think so.

And so, you know, it just, that was one of the first experiences where I recognized, like, I couldn’t, I couldn’t hustle my way out of that.

Avery – 04:56

Yeah, that’s totally fair.

And so from that experience, did it change how you approach different things as a high achiever?

Or was the lesson still not fully solidified yet?

Lindsay – 05:09

Yeah.

Yeah, no, no, because at 21, you know, your gray matter isn’t completely fully formed, all the connections aren’t there yet, so no, the short answer is I did not learn my lesson.

You know, I got divorced, you know, so I got married and had a baby at 21 and by 23 I was divorced and living as a single mother and I really deeply desired to finish my university degree, you know, getting married and having a baby.

I was working full time.

I was a single mom with a very small child.

I was taking three university courses and I was commuting an hour each way to work.

So no, the short answer is no, I tried to hustle my way out of that situation as well.

Lindsay – 05:56

And of course, being a high achiever, I wanted to have exceptional marks.

Like I wasn’t just going to go and finish my degree, I was going to go and it was going to be, you know, like it was going to be a 3.5 or a 4.0, 80%, I was going to get an A. Um, or it wasn’t good enough.

And what I did was hustled myself straight into my first experience of burnout and mono.

I got mono and I was completely, not only was I exhausted, like my body was just drained, right?

Absolutely.

Avery – 06:25

Mono is a very good way to make you slow down.

Lindsay – 06:30

Yeah, cause you’re just sleeping 18 hours a day for about six weeks straight.

Avery – 06:34

Yeah, absolutely.

So what were some of the red flags for that burnout experience that you wish you didn’t miss?

Because again, hindsight’s a jerk.

So looking back on it, what would you wish you could have told yourself?

Lindsay – 06:49

Yeah, I mean, if I had to go back to my 23 year old self, First of all, I’d spend a lot of time giving her some real empathy and talking her through the fact that that first marriage did not mean that she was a screw-up, did not mean that she was a failure, it just meant the marriage failed.

And from there I would tell her that she had nothing to prove, that she didn’t need to go back and take three courses all at once.

I would also tell her that she was in a shitty job and working for a shitty boss and she should quit, because that’s the truth of it.

And yeah, I would just give her a lot of love and a lot of patience and a lot of kindness because I think, you know, that’s what we need as high achievers is we just need someone to help us see ourselves as brilliant just as we are.

Avery – 07:47

Yes, brilliant aside from whatever we accomplish.

Just for breathing and being.

Which is really hard for us to accept, isn’t it?

Lindsay – 08:00

It is.

And I think in that space in particular, I just, I really felt like such a failure.

I really did.

I, you know, I got into a marriage that I should never have been in.

And, you know, I actually had family, you know, try to tell me that.

And I was hell-bent.

Like I was, I was going to marry that man.

Lindsay – 08:17

I was going to have a family with him.

And so part of that is, you know, that living repercussion and the regret.

And I think that absolutely fires the high trigger because you’re going to prove, you’re going to prove even more that you are not a failure, right?

So one thing really exacerbated the other, particularly in my circumstance.

Avery – 08:42

Yeah, absolutely.

And one of the things that we’ve also talked about in the past is that burnout isn’t really a cycle, like you don’t come back up to where you were before after you burn out, it’s kind of more like a wave, like you had to hit the peak, you crash down, you come up a little bit and then you crash down

a little bit more and then you’re kind of just hovering around surviving.

So this experience of burnout, it was not your only experience of burnout, is that true?

Lindsay – 09:08

Yeah, no, I mean, certainly I’ve had more than one, that is absolutely the truth.

And yeah, you do ride the wave and you do come back, I think, after an experience like that.

You do have to slow down, like whether you like it or not as a high achiever, you hit the wall, is the truth.

And so then you have to, but yeah, certainly again, Several years later, as a more experienced professional, I actually really had a very significant burnout experience where I actually had to step away from my job for several weeks.

The truth is, I was really sick.

I had a major depressive episode.

Thank God for my mother.

Lindsay – 09:56

I have an incredibly supportive family.

And it was actually my mom that came to me and said, you’re not well.

You’re not looking after yourself very well.

You’re not looking after your girl very well.

And again, I was a single mom for like 12 years.

So I was single for a very long time.

And so this was in the middle of that single parenting and which is like that’s hard just all of that like if all you had to do was just be a single parent but then of course you were also working a full-time gig again working in an environment that was pretty toxic and for a leader that was not

Lindsay – 10:35

that said she was understanding but really was not My mom actually had to take me to the doctor and I had to step away from work for a period of time of course because then you go on those medications, the antidepressants or the anti-anxieties and actually makes it worse instead of better in the

short term.

A lot of them and they take time to build up to a therapeutic level in your system and so I really, I did, I had to step away from full-time work I had to step away from full-time parenting.

My parents had to step in and really support me because I was struggling deeply.

I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t eating.

That is not helpful in any way.

And then, again, another decade later, I ended up working for an incredibly toxic boss.

Lindsay – 11:32

A narcissistic sociopathic gaslighter.

And again, found myself in a space of really significant burnout.

Now the thing is, at least as a high achiever, you do actually learn.

You learn through the school of hard knocks.

And the last time that I got really close to burnout, I actually knew what that looked like because I had been there.

Avery – 12:01

So what were the signs?

What did you notice?

Lindsay – 12:03

Yeah, I was again not sleeping.

This time I was eating too much so I gained a ton of weight.

I was back on any anxiety meds after not being on them for many years.

I was like chronically ill. Every month I would catch a new bug or virus.

If you came around me and you sneezed, I was going to get it.

It’s remarkable how your immune system just takes a dive.

Avery – 12:33

Yeah, it’s so tied to the stress response and cortisol.

Lindsay – 12:37

Body keeps the score.

Whether you are paying attention to the scoreboard or not, your body’s always keeping the score.

You know, the truth is I really noticed that my thought process, like my ability to problem solve was compromised.

I wasn’t being as creative and innovative as I normally was.

Um, I was not, uh, you know, I was kind of, I don’t want to say conspiracy theory, but you get into that head space where it’s, you’re kind of on the treadmill of, is somebody out to get me?

Avery – 13:10

Totally.

Lindsay – 13:11

Well, and to be fair, again, I was working for a gas lighter.

She was out to get me.

Um, I wasn’t, I wasn’t actually making that part up, but you start to see that in all sorts of places that it doesn’t actually exist.

That’s one of the things that I really experienced.

And then, you know, the ironic part was I was just drained.

I did some testing after the fact and I literally had no vitamins or minerals left in my system like they were all gone.

Leached right out.

Avery – 13:45

Yeah, your body used every last ounce of energy you had stored anywhere.

Yeah.

Lindsay – 13:50

Yeah, it did.

And in this particular episode, this caused me to leave my corporate HR career.

I quit in the middle of a meeting with the toxic boss.

Wow.

I couldn’t tolerate it anymore.

Avery – 14:06

That’s almost like a sitcom exit of something that’s so unique that you got to quit right in the middle of a meeting.

Lindsay – 14:14

Yeah, it wasn’t planned.

It was completely spontaneous.

But I really, I guess, you know, you go through some of those, again, as a high achiever, and a people pleaser.

You know, we have a club, we meet every Wednesday, bring wine.

Yeah, I’m here.

I think because I had several of those experiences in my younger years, And I knew, like I was confident in my career and my skill set and in my ability.

This, you know, this was me in, you know, sort of in my late 30s, early 40s.

Lindsay – 14:53

And as a woman, you flip a switch when you turn 40. 40. And the truth is, you just don’t tolerate a lot of BS anymore.

And it doesn’t get better.

It actually gets worse as you get older.

By the time you’re like 75, you don’t give a shit about anybody.

At any rate, there’s something magical about turning 40. 40. And so I think that was the pieces that I just recognized that it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter if she didn’t think I was good enough.

It didn’t matter if she didn’t think I was doing the right.

Lindsay – 15:22

It didn’t matter if she wanted to bully me.

I just wasn’t tolerating that and and it was like something magical happened in the moment and I said you know what I don’t think I fit here anymore and I’ve been in this this I’ve been in this job for 10 years or in this business this is a place I had long-term career plans long-term career plans

and yeah it was like like a switch flipped and I said no I’m out.

And I shut my, I said, no, I’m, I’m getting really emotional now.

So I’m going to shut my computer off.

And I walked away.

I left a 10 year curve behind.

Lindsay – 16:06

Wow.

Unknown speaker – 16:07

Yeah.

Avery – 16:07

And so explain the journey to me from that point.

How did you start to dig yourself back out from that pre-burnout state?

And how did you get to yourself to where you’re doing now?

Lindsay – 16:18

Yeah.

So I drove myself home.

I’m not sure how I got here.

My husband was home, which was great.

And he said, like, what’s wrong with you?

And I said, well, I think I just quit my job.

And he was like, you did what?

Lindsay – 16:31

What are you talking about?

I spent, that was like a Thursday.

I spent the weekend in bed watching every season of Game of Thrones in the dark.

And then I got up on Monday morning and thought, Okay, well I’m not going back, so I guess I better figure out where I’m going forward.

Now at the time, I had already committed to the coaching program that I have a designation in.

And I knew that I really wanted to strengthen my coaching skill set and that practice.

Being an HR professional, I did a lot of coaching already, but I knew I wanted to go deeper.

Lindsay – 17:15

And so I was able to, from August to September, Go to the coach training institute, which is where I was able to go to them and say, listen, I was only supposed to take one course this fall, but I want to take all of them.

And so what I did was in a matter of weeks, I was walking into a hotel boardroom.

Sitting down with a group of people who became incredible friends and peers for me and I dove very deeply into the coach training and I will tell you that that had a profound effect on my ability to recover from burnout because I received not only incredible coaching from my peers and also From the

master coaches that run the program.

But I had an environment of people that were deeply committed but also very vulnerable.

We were all learning together.

Everybody was essentially new to this.

Lindsay – 18:16

There was an incredible container.

In the in the in the learning this was sort of the basic tenants of the program that we went into and and so like I just I found a group of humans who were compassionate who were unafraid of the emotion as it came up And that was absolutely critical to processing all of the crap, all of the anger,

all of the resentment, all of the frustration, all of the grief.

Because when I left that job, that was me leaving a 10-year career, like where I saw myself growing.

So they were unafraid.

To give me the space to process all of that emotion.

And that was significant.

Lindsay – 19:06

I would tell you my friend group was crucial, and my family, because I was angry.

And then I was sad.

Like varying degrees at any moment in time.

Right?

It was tricky.

It was tricky.

And I was exhausted.

Lindsay – 19:24

So I actually spent a lot of time working on my physical health.

Again, Drained of all good things, all the nutrients were gone.

I don’t know how I was standing, like to be real about it.

So I went on a pretty significant regime of vitamins and minerals to try and pump my system back up.

I did some diet shifts that made a big difference for me and I spent a lot of time just processing, journaling, which again was part of the coaching program that I was taking but I just needed to get it out.

Avery – 20:03

Yeah.

Yeah.

That sounds so powerful.

That whole shift.

And it was just like you said, it’s the support.

Yeah.

That you were not alone in that space.

Avery – 20:12

It seemed to have a really big impact for you.

That’s so beautiful.

Thank you for sharing that.

Lindsay – 20:17

Yeah.

Yeah, it was.

The coaching was critical for me.

Unknown speaker – 20:20

100%.

Avery – 20:23

So if somebody is listening right now and is totally relating to your story, working for a super toxic boss, wishing that they could just quit, what would you tell them?

Unknown speaker – 20:23

100%.

Lindsay – 20:34

Get out.

Get out.

You have skills and experience that are valuable.

And if you can’t afford to quit right away, that’s cool, I get that.

Get your resume together, get your cover letter together, get your LinkedIn shined up and put yourself out there.

You don’t have to stay in a space where you feel it is abusive and inappropriate.

And the truth is that’s where I was.

Lindsay – 21:00

I spent two years trying to please someone, trying to hustle for my self-worth.

She was never going to approve of me.

And if you’re listening and you’re in that moment, it’s never going to be good enough.

So pack up your toys and go home immediately.

What is strong and beautiful message?

I’m over here being like, ah, yeah, yeah.

Don’t tolerate it.

Lindsay – 21:28

Don’t tolerate it.

Go and find yourself a new job.

Go and work at McDonald’s if you have to.

Like you deserve self-respect and you are valuable and just get yourself out of that situation immediately.

Avery – 21:43

Yeah.

Beautiful.

So tell us Lindsay, if people want to learn a little bit more about you and what you do, and maybe if they’re an entrepreneur wanting to help get better at leading their team, where should they find you?

Lindsay – 21:57

Yeah, you can find me.

My website is the first place and that’s highvoltageleadership.ca.

There’s more about me and what I do and how I do it.

I’m on Instagram and my handle is at highvoltleadership so you can come and follow me.

I’m also on LinkedIn a lot so come and find me, Lindsay White.

I’d love to connect and I try really hard to share valuable content to help female entrepreneurs and small business owners do a really great job as they build and grow and lead their teams and I’d love to connect with you.

Avery – 22:34

That sounds wonderful.

So we’ll link to all of those things in the show notes for sure.

So if there was only one thing that somebody got from this episode and the last thing that you want them to remember, what do you want it to be?

Lindsay – 22:46

Yeah, that you don’t have to tolerate a toxic boss.

You don’t have to.

Lovely.

Avery – 22:56

Well, thank you so much, Lindsay.

This was such a great chat and I really appreciate your vulnerability.

Multiple speakers – 23:01

Well, thanks.

Lindsay – 23:03

Thanks for having me.

I love sharing that story.

Avery – 23:06

It’s a really powerful story and I know a lot of people will be able to relate to it.

Thanks.

Hey hey hey hey hey, do not press that skip button yet.

Yes, this is the end of the episode, but I still have something else I think you’re really going to like.

I know, you’re already an expert at setting goals that push you out of your comfort zone.

Let’s be real, you’re a high achiever after all.

But how often do you sabotage yourself on the way to achieving those goals?

Avery – 23:34

Perfectionism, procrasti-planning, over-committing, holding yourself to a double standard.

All of these things can sabotage our progress by either slowing it down or making it impossible for us to achieve our goals.

Like we talk about so often on this podcast, awareness of what’s causing the issue is the first step.

So take that first step by going to thetruthaboutburnout.com slash quiz to take our free quiz to discover your self-sabotage style.

And of course, I won’t leave you stuck.

Once you complete the quiz and discover your primary self-sabotage style, I’ll follow up with an email giving you ideas about what to do about it so that it stops holding you back.

Go to thetruthaboutburnout.com slash quiz to get started.

Avery – 24:19

That’s it for now, until next week.