#friedfam: Top Advice from FRIED Listeners and Burnout Recoverers

01/26/25 • 36 min

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

“Don’t shame your limitations.” Cait Donovan and Sarah Vosen share this piece of wisdom in this #FRIEDfam episode, weaving together lessons from their community and their own experiences to explore self-compassion and meaningful burnout recovery.

How often do we forget to listen to ourselves, honor our limitations, or simplify our approach to recovery? Cait and Sarah remind us that true healing comes with self-compassion, small steps, and leaning into support when we need it most.

Join Cait and Sarah to discover practical tips, heartfelt stories, and the collective wisdom that can guide your path to a more sustainable and fulfilling recovery.

Quotes

“We’re going to start with one of my favorites that came from Chandra Dorsett. And she said four simple words. And these words, when I read them, punched me right in the gut. She said, ‘Don’t shame your limitations.’” (02:19 | Cait Donovan)
“Stop trying to work so hard on getting better that it becomes a new source of stress, and learn to embrace the wayward journey of recovery.” (05:29 | Cait Donovan)
“There is not one right way to do anything. There is a right way for you.” (18:03 | Sarah Vosen)
“My friend Lauren Baptiste said—and she’s been on the podcast before—she said, ‘Your drive for excellence isn’t keeping you excellent, it’s keeping you exhausted.” (24:28 | Cait Donovan)
“This is a fellow burnout expert, Natalia Saman, who said, ‘The purpose of self-care is to reduce stress. If your nails look great, but you’re still buried under a pile of work, a pedicure wasn’t the self-care you needed. You needed boundaries.’” (25:37 | Cait Donovan)
“Self-care is self-care if you feel cared for when you do it or after it’s done.” (27:14 | Sarah Vosen)

Links

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Join Cait and Sarah to discover practical tips, heartfelt stories, and the collective wisdom that can guide your path to a more sustainable and fulfilling recovery.

Quotes

“We’re going to start with one of my favorites that came from Chandra Dorsett. And she said four simple words. And these words, when I read them, punched me right in the gut. She said, ‘Don’t shame your limitations.’” (02:19 | Cait Donovan)
“Stop trying to work so hard on getting better that it becomes a new source of stress, and learn to embrace the wayward journey of recovery.” (05:29 | Cait Donovan)
“There is not one right way to do anything. There is a right way for you.” (18:03 | Sarah Vosen)
“My friend Lauren Baptiste said—and she’s been on the podcast before—she said, ‘Your drive for excellence isn’t keeping you excellent, it’s keeping you exhausted.” (24:28 | Cait Donovan)
“This is a fellow burnout expert, Natalia Saman, who said, ‘The purpose of self-care is to reduce stress. If your nails look great, but you’re still buried under a pile of work, a pedicure wasn’t the self-care you needed. You needed boundaries.’” (25:37 | Cait Donovan)
“Self-care is self-care if you feel cared for when you do it or after it’s done.” (27:14 | Sarah Vosen)

Links

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Previous Episode

Jennifer Moss: Why Are We Here? How To Systematically Create Better Work Cultures

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

“This isn’t some soft skill, or a ‘nice-to-have.’ It’s a must-have,” says Jennifer Moss, workplace strategist, co-founder of The Workplace Institute, and author of award-winning books on leadership. Her latest book, “Why Are We Here?,” discusses how we can use hope as an operational strategy at work, how employees can learn to bring their whole, best selves to work by meting out goals in small steps and celebrating each small win en route to the larger goal. Leaders, in turn, can learn to, rather than mitigate those efforts, be conduits to employees’ mental health, in part by being encouraging and being receptive to employee feedback.

This isn’t about drumming up toxic positivity but creating a safe and openly communicative environment, which is more easily said than done when employees feel, even subconsciously, that their freedoms are being taken away and that promises have been repeatedly broken. Jennifer and host Cait Donovan discuss how to foster trust between leaders and employees and how caring for oneself creates a feeling of safety—starting at a physical level—which is the first step in opening up lines of communication, and facilitating what Jennifer calls “a culture of positive gossip.”

As many as seventy percent of employees report that their managers make or break their attitude toward their jobs. Join today’s episode of FRIED to learn how to introduce a hope-based strategy into your own work environment.

Quotes

“We can help our employees have quick wins every day, celebrate the smaller wins, recognize that we spend a lot of time lately only celebrating and rewarding and recognizing the big project end goals, not realizing that the day-to-day ennui, the day-to-day tedium is what is burning people out. And if we just made these goals more incremental — it’s actually how you support young kids, especially kids who are neurodivergent—you chunk out the goals and adults need those same inspirational ways of working, and that’s how we make hope a strategy.” (12:29 | Jennifer Moss)
“That’s where we make hope a strategy and operationalize hope. It’s first recognizing that it isn’t some sort of soft skill or a “nice-to-have,’ it’s a ‘must-have,’ that it’s real. The military abides by this rule, and it can be operationalized on a day-to-day engagement in our work and in our employees’ tasks.” (13:10 | Jennifer Moss)
“You can be highly passionate about what you do, and highly driven and care about your organization and...highly engaged, but you can be similarly at the same stage of burnout. And if we can’t talk about those things, no one will know, and that’s when people quit, that’s when people hit the wall. It’s where everything just ends.” (24:33 | Jennifer Moss)
“We are subconsciously rebelling because our freedoms are being taken away and we’re not necessarily aware of why we feel this dissonance.” (33:51 | Jennifer Moss)

Links

Connect with Jennifer Moss:

https://www.jennifer-moss.com/

https://www.instagram.com/betterworkinstitute/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenleighmoss/

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm

Next Episode

Dr. Jessi Gold: Healthcare - Burnout, Emotions, and Culture Shifts

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Burnout is more than feeling tired. It’s a challenge that affects every aspect of life, especially for healthcare professionals. In this episode, Dr. Jessi Gold shares her deeply personal experience navigating burnout as a psychiatrist during the pandemic, and offers a rare glimpse into the struggles even experts face.

What can we do when the very systems designed to support us become the cause of our suffering? Dr. Gold and Cait Donovan explore the systemic issues in healthcare that perpetuate burnout, from overwork to the culture of self-neglect ingrained in medical training. They also discuss how small shifts—like embracing vulnerability and prioritizing self-care—can make a meaningful difference, even in a broken system.

How can we address burnout without blaming individuals for their struggles? Dr. Gold and Cait’s discussion invites you to rethink how we approach burnout, recovery, and the collective responsibility to create healthier environments.

Quotes

“As a psychiatrist who is an expert in burnout, I have an extra added layer of fun to this story, which is that I see people all day and tell them they’re burnt out and don’t necessarily apply the same thing to myself.” (04:32 | Dr. Jessi Gold)
“It’s so hard to admit that something like work or systems at work could make you feel ill. I feel like it’s so much easier to be like, it just made me tired, but it didn’t actually hurt me in some way that needs to be replenished or fixed or whatever.” (14:21 | Dr. Jessi Gold)
“Our culture is a culture of silence and shame. Most of us are struggling and don’t mention that we’re struggling. And if we knew other people were struggling, even a little bit, we would open up to them more and feel safer in our culture.” (42:42 | Dr. Jessi Gold)
“If someone said this job is really, really hard emotionally, physically, every other thing that you can think of, and it will impact you, and you will burn out from it. And as a result, you need to take care of yourself in the process. I would have been like, ‘Oh, okay.’” (43:53 | Dr. Jessi Gold)
“The second I started to burn out, that’s what went, right? Like, the second that I was not okay, like, to a more extreme extent, I was not treating patients the way that I would want them to be treated, right? As humans.” (50:42 | Dr. Jessi Gold)

Links

Connect with Dr. Jessi Gold:

https://www.drjessigold.com/

https://www.instagram.com/drjessigold/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessi-gold-md-ms-14844bb/

Connect with Cait:

Initial Call with Cait: bit.ly/callcait

Initial Call with Sarah: bit.ly/callsarahv

Burnout Recovery works better with support. UNFRIED is our small group (5 people max!) coaching program to help guide you through your recovery. Apply now! [http://bit.ly/unfried]

Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm