All Signs Pointed to Success. Why I Blew It All Up.

The long road back from burnout. Part 1.

I can’t tell you exactly how I landed on the bathroom floor.

All I can tell you is, in that moment, the cold tile was soothing against my cheek. I felt the purest sense of exhaustion I’d ever felt. I could do nothing but lie there, astonished that my breath was still moving in and out of my body.

It was 4 a.m. I was in a hotel room in downtown Toronto. I had not slept in over 24 hours. Truth be told, I had not slept more than four consecutive hours in weeks.

Later that morning, I was expected in one of the hotel conference rooms to oversee a national news conference. In that moment, the news conference felt less of a hurdle than simply getting off the bathroom floor.

As I lay there, I heard a voice in my head.

Clear and stark.

“If you keep doing this, you will die.”

On the outside, everything looked ideal.

I was in my thirties. I was married to a kind and supportive man (still am) and I had two little boys. I had a promising career. I was in negotiations to become a partner in my firm. My income was growing. I had a solid reputation in the communications field. On the outside, it appeared there was nowhere to go but up.

Yet, in the weeks leading up to that morning, I had worked more than 12 hours a day, seven days a week. I remember some nights telling myself that if I went to bed at 1:00 a.m., I could get up at 4:00 and still have four hours to catch up before I had to be in the office. At one point, I became unable to sleep. I stopped eating because my stomach was so inflamed with stress, I couldn’t handle food.

I became hyper-vigilant, obsessive, and irritable at work. My primary fuel was anxiety.

I finally picked myself up off the bathroom floor and arrived at the news conference in a kind of numb autopilot. I knew that I was done.

In the ensuing three months, I walked away from my job, the partnership opportunity, and half our family income. Not only did I not have any clear prospects for another job, I didn’t have the physical or mental capacity to go on working.

As a dear friend once wrote to me “…after six hard years of working almost non-stop, you abruptly quit and fell on the couch for a year.”

It took more than a year before I could work again. During that period, I was haunted by the question,

Is a successful career even possible for me?

Did career advancement mean I had to hand over my life? Were success and stress inevitable bedfellows? Or was it me? Was there something wrong with me? Was I not cut out for this?

When I finally returned to work, I did so gradually. I took short freelance contracts at first. Over time, I rebuilt my career, but on my own terms, using different, more holistic metrics for success. 

As a communications consultant, I developed close working relationships with many executives, business owners, and other leaders. Sometimes, we would have deeper conversations. They would share their challenges, their stress, fears, or even feelings of self-doubt and inadequacy. It became clear to me through those conversations that what I thought was unique to me, was much more common than I realized. People, who were by any standard, high-performing, successful professionals, were suffering.

At the urging of some of these leaders, I shifted my focus, retrained, and became an Executive Coach.

Today, based on personal experience and two decades of coaching, I can say that life and work do not have to be at war with each other. Struggling with overwhelm and stress are not signs of inadequacy. You don’t have to sacrifice your life to achieve great things at work. In fact, your work and your personal life can actually nourish one another.

Finding that mutually nourishing relationship between work and life is a process. In my case, a long, slow one. It is not an end state, but rather an ongoing dance. Among other things, it takes practice. But the practice is worth it. You are worth it.

Why I called my newsletter The Slow Sip.

I am still in the dance. I still stumble. I lose the rhythm, stub my toes. I still struggle. But these days, my work is more rewarding, in part, because I am able to put it down. And life is more interesting, more nuanced, more meaningful.

My favorite time of the day is around 8:30 every morning when I take my first slow sip of coffee. I’m like Pavlov’s dog. The dopamine starts to spike as soon as I hear the coffee gurgle through the filter. For a while, I tried to break my caffeine habit, but now I’ve decided to just go with it. To use it to remind me to pause, to get present. To remind me that life is better savored. That it is best when I take it one slow sip at a time.

This is the path of The Slow Sip. It’s what we’ll talk about here. I hope you’ll join me.

Please take care of yourself.

The ideas, concepts, recommendations, and practices I talk about here are for general informational purposes only and should not be considered advice for your unique situation or treatment for mental illness, trauma, or other health conditions. If you are having difficulty functioning or are experiencing persistent anxiety, depression, or other symptoms, please see your family doctor.