Burnout: 4 Leaders share real-world stories and how to cope

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Welcome to Meet The Leader, the podcast where top leaders share how they're tackling the world's toughest challenges.

In today's episode, we talk battling burnout. Leaders will share their personal stories and the strategies that work, practical tactical steps that can help anyone, any leader, and any team.

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I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum and this is Meet The Leader.

Nadya Okamoto, August: I've burned out to the point of being in like emergency rooms and residential rehab and I've gone to a place in my life of realizing like rest is the most important thing in my entrepreneurial journey.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Are you burned out? You're probably burned out. I say this not because we've had a year of jolts and uncertainty. I say this because, statistically speaking, one in two people working today are burned out or have experienced burnout. This is a problem that the World Health Organization estimates costs the world a trillion dollars – a trillion dollars! -- all to working days lost to anxiety, depression and more.

I'm going to run through some symptoms and you can tell me if you relate. You're exhausted. You're cynical. You can't focus. You feel like you're not good at anything, that you can't cope. And at its very worst, all these feelings of burnout can even bring you to a mental and physical shutdown.

Investment in wellbeing at work, as you could probably guess, has never been higher. And yet burnout has never gone away.

We talked to a range of leaders this year on their personal experiences with burnout. They talked about the moments that they brushed away as just a busy period. Just a symptom of hustle culture. And they talked about other things like fainting and finding themselves in emergency rooms, learning too late that they had pushed themselves beyond the limits. Don't let yourself or your teammates get to that point. We're going to share their stories and their tips on how you can recognize these symptoms of burnout and get yourself on a better path.

We'll get started with David Ko. David is the CEO of Calm. That is a mobile app that's looking to make the world healthier and happier, all through tools like sleep stories and mobile support. It has reached more than 160 million people. And it has also conducted a special survey with Harvard Business Review that revealed some interesting leadership blind spots when it comes to burnout.

My colleague, Julia Rignot, talked to David about this in Davos. Here's what they had to say.

David Ko, Calm: There's complete blind spots. Actually, we did a study back with the Harvard Business Review. In that study, we polled a lot of leaders about workforce, mental health and wellbeing. And over 85% of them, I want to say, said they value mental health services for their employees. But then when you followed up with them and said, how many of you actually implement that? It was less than 30%. So, there's this huge gap.

The other thing that happened when I went and spent a lot of time with different leaders – and this is a little bit of a part of my own book [Recharge] – was that I got great advice from them. And then I would ask them, do you share this advice with your employees? And they would say, no. And I was like, why? It is so fulfilling. And they were like, well, would it be a sign of weakness? And I was like well, let me ask you something. If you don't talk about your own mental health journeys. How do you expect them to talk about what's happening at work? Will they feel afraid about retribution or the stigma or how they may be labeled?

On a personal note, it took me a while to open up in my own company – you can create a more resilient workforce. You can create workforce that creates a stronger culture. You can create a workforce that will say, hey, we're more resilient, and understand that you're never going to have stress-free work environment. You're going have to work for deadlines. But how do you balance that as a leader going forward?

One leader said this to me. He said, every once in a while, you need to get out of gear. The mind doesn't have endless capacity. At some point, it needs to take a break, just like you, and think about that for your employees. Think about your messaging. So I think about a lot as a leader, and I hope other leaders will as well.

Have you ever been in those back to back meetings where the like six, four hours, you know, and there's no breaks in between. And all of a sudden you're like, you're not you're not sharp. You're supposed to give advice to lots of people, people who have spent a lot of time maybe on presentations for you. It's almost better if you were to say, hey, let's take a ten minute break. I'm going to go kind of reset a little. I'll recharge for myself and I'll come back. Even if that time is much shorter than your allocated time. You can be more present.

How often have you been in a room with leaders and you can tell they're not present. They're thinking about other things. That advice you may give, that time you may give with your employees. It's not well spent time. That's where workforce productivity matters. That's where you matter as a leader. That's where your messages matter. That's how you train. Employees matter. That's where their managers matter. That's why a lot of things I feel like if we can think about it more holistically rather than one, that's where you can create a much more resilient workforce going forward.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Paula Bellostas Muguerza is the Global Head of Healthcare and Life Sciences at Kearney, that’s a global consulting firm. And as a partner there, she looks after clients in the biopharma industry and also leads the firm's global healthcare and life science work. In other words, she's no stranger to the health space and she founded a platform that, along with 350 other organizations, is using big levers from investment to data to help bridge gaps in women's health.

Still, a few years ago, Paula found herself in a hospital room because a colleague thought she was having a stroke. It wasn't, it was burnout. And big gaps in the mental health care space for women are making it even harder to recognize and treat burnout. I'll let Paula tell us more.

Paula Bellostas Muguerza, Kearney: Love to tell you about my burnout story. And it's taken a few years to almost look back at it and see it as a positive thing that happened in my life. But it really didn't feel positive at the time.

I think it was 2015 or 2016. So again, it's coming up to nearly a decade ago. And I've always been a bit of a people-pleaser and always putting my hand up for everything. And then almost like when you're in a meeting and somebody tells you, oh, who would like to take this on? Like, without me knowing, my hand would be going up. And then I ended up at a time when it was a really busy period at work. And one of my colleagues actually went on mental health leave. And I have this sort of like superwoman syndrome of I must save the situation. So, I know that he's off and I know my plate is already very full, but give me his workload and I will deliver for you.

And within about three months, I started to get really horrific headaches. But I just pushed through and pushed through and pushed and I knew that physically I was getting to the limit. So then just one day, I was on a conference call in a meeting room, and I thought, something weird is happening with my face, like it started to droop. So, I walked out of the meeting room and then my boss at the time just looked at me and said, we need to get you in a taxi or an ambulance to the hospital, you're having a stroke. I was like, how am I going to be having a strike? Like I'm young, this can't be happening.

So we go to the hospital, got triaged and in straight away, and they scanned me and they said, there isn't any blockages, we don't really know what's happening. So, I went back to work the following day. And then from that day onwards, for about 30 days, I was having one of these like droopage, like seizures, where everything was spinning around me every single day.

I got passed between so many different people and it was neurologists and it's cardiologists and there was all sorts of different things, psychologists to see what is happening and nobody could figure out where I was. Until eventually they said, this is a very, very rare, what they called epigenetic form of migraine. And it's called hemiplegic migraine, and basically you have it in your genes that you could have the potential to develop this, but it only manifests if you have put your body under a lot of strain. So, a lot of cortisol and a lot of adrenaline is going to trigger this. And once you start having them, you're forever going to have them.

But they started to get so severe that I would wake up in the morning and then this thing would happen. But then from my face, then it went to my hand and then went to my leg. So there were days when I couldn't really walk. I couldn't really just kind of feed myself or like go to the toilet on my own. So, I needed a lot of help from, at the time, my fiancé, who's now my husband and father of my child. So, thank God he stuck around because at that time he could have gone like, I don't know what's going on, I'm getting out of here. But a lot of help from my friends, a lot of support from my now husband and also from, from my employer, to be fair, to just make sure that was supported.

But I couldn't work for six months because these things kept going. And the brain fog, the pain, the sort of feeling of the room spinning and then the inability to function meant that at the time they didn't really know if I was going to be able to work again. So, moving around neurologists, eventually I came across somebody that said, we need to completely reset your life. You need to go back to no caffeine, no sugar, we need to kind of like clean you up entirely, you need to start doing strength training, you to get your steps in. We need to get you to speak to somebody, to offload some of the reasons why this has happened because physical health and mental health are so intertwined.

So, I had to do all of those things. It came to the point where I started to get a little bit better, but it was still happening. And what they decided was, okay, we've got two options: One, we continue on this path and we try a medical device, or we put you on this therapy, which the side effects are pretty significant and you could go into manic depression. So, I said, okay, no, I'm going to try the device and continuing with this sort of like clean living.

And at the same time, I was having very intensive therapy because why did I feel the need to constantly put my hand up to totally just say yes to absolutely everything? And there was a lot of soul searching to say, well, where is your source of self-worth and self-esteem? Why do you need all of this external validation? Where is this coming from? Is it something that’s to do with upbringing? Something that’s to with gender? It's just so convoluted. But I really had to do the work so that if I was to return to the workplace, it wouldn't happen again.

So finally, I made it back. So, six months off and I returned. And I think it's just, I've been on an eight-year journey of discovery ever since.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And how do you work differently now and live differently? What are the steps that you take?

Paula Bellostas Muguerza, Kearney: So, post burnout, I had to kind of like reset on everything. So first of all, from a physical health perspective, so making sure that I wasn't abusing sugar and caffeine and alcohol, eating a lot of protein and a lot vegetables and fiber and exercise, exercise, exercise for me is like my outlet to make sure that my brain stays healthy.

And then the second piece is I'm throwing myself back into the lion's den here. So, I can do all of these good things on the physical health side, but if I don't make sure that I don't address the other pieces, I could go back very, very quickly. So, the first thing was, I need to learn to set boundaries and say no. And two things happen. I did a graduated return. So, the first week, I was there for an hour, second week, I was there for four hours, third week, and I built it up over a course of about two to three months until I went back at full time.

And that in itself was a learning experience because how much can you do with a small chunk of time, you can't say yes to everything. You have to be very deliberate as to what you take on and what you say no to. So that was my sort of like coming up to speed and then until we were able to take the little wheels off and I was off on my bike.

So that was one thing, just learning to say no and sitting with the discomfort of saying no, and then really sitting with the feeling is like, why is this uncomfortable? Is this uncomfortable because somebody is going to think less of me? And then going one step further and saying, why do I need them to think that I'm amazing? I need to tell myself that I am amazing. I don't need all of these other people.

And then the third thing was, just the difference between what we call extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. So extrinsic motivation is your, when you're motivated by things outside of you. So, it could be money, it could visibility, it could power, it be somebody giving you a nice little pat on the head, which was totally my motivation. To actually, why am I doing this? That makes me happy, that makes me fulfilled, that makes want to do these things. And doing more of that, finding more the opportunities to really cultivate that intrinsic motivation. Because if you're intrinsically motivated, you don't need as much of the external stuff. So, it was a combination of all those things.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Li Li Leung is the former CEO of USA Gymnastics, the governing body for the sport in the US. Ignoring mental health in gymnastics can have dangerous - even fatal - consequences. She talked us about the moment one elite athlete stepped back during competition, and the support she received.

She also talked to us about resources like emotional support dogs and mental health professionals available for athletes and coaches, and how visible steps like these go a long way to preventing burnout as well as building resilience and psychological safety.

Li Li Leung, USA Gymnastics: Normally, the career of a gymnast does not last that long. It is your life after the sport, which is a lot longer. And so, we want to make sure that we are setting our athletes for the best success in life beyond the sport, and that we are utilizing the sport of gymnastics to be able to provide them with the skills to become high-functioning individuals in society.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Why don't you take us through some of these resources that USA Gymnastics has put in place on the mental health end? What do those look like?

Li Li Leung, USA Gymnastics: Yeah, we have put in quite a few resources on mental, emotional, physical health.On the mental side of things. We provide our national team, athletes and coaches the ability to have basically unlimited visits with mental health providers.

As you mentioned before, we are also a grassroots organization that we're responsible for over 200,000 members. And so, what I just mentioned were resources for our national team athletes. However, we are also providing resources for the masses within our community. We put out monthly webinars. We have regional national congresses that focus on mental health. We have courses about elevating your athletes. And so, we're really focused on being able to provide resources for our entire community.

And then one big hit on the emotional health side of things is we launched a therapy dog programme. If you Google “USA Gymnastics Beacon”, you will find Beacon, who is our official therapy dog. We launched it in 2023. He has done many, many sessions with, with our athletes, with our coaches, with staffers, with judges, with the entire community. And we also bring on multiple other therapy dog teams to come to our events.

And the feedback from that has been absolutely tremendous and, and incredible. Not only are athletes saying this is the best programme ever that USA Gymnastics has launched, but we've noticed that coaches have really taken to therapy dog programme. Coaches who were stoic before, I have seen them smile for the first time when they bend down and they, and they pet a therapy dog. And our athletes are saying, well, you know, the therapy dog has reduced my coach's anxiety and stress level. And, in turn, the athletes’ stress levels further reduce because of that.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: There's a famous moment that happened at the Tokyo Games with Simone Biles and I can have you speak more about it but she withdrew from the women's final. And it got a lot of attention for a lot of things, including the fact that she felt comfortable saying, "You know what? I can't compete today." Can you tell us a little bit about that moment and why it’s so important.

Li Li Leung, USA Gymnastics: Yes, so Simone did withdraw from the competition after her first event, which was vault. And she got a case of the twisties, which is so much like the yips in golf. So, when you get the twisties, you, you get lost in the air when you're flipping and twisting. And it is incredibly dangerous because then you cannot land. She could have she could have landed on her head. She could injured herself seriously. So, she rightfully made the decision to pull out of competition because her health and safety was a priority.

The priority was not winning a medal, it was not getting on podium. It was the health and safety of Simone at that point in time. We supported her decision 100% to pull out because, again, the wellbeing of the athletes, we've said it, that it's our priority and we really believe that.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And did this moment help shape some of the resources that were later put in place, right so that happened in 2020? Some of this other stuff has happened sort of as we've gone on. How did that impact some of the other resources that were put in place for mental health?

Li Li Leung, USA Gymnastics: Yeah, there's no question that Simone withdrawing from the Olympics shined a light on the need for mental health resources for our athletes and for the global community as well. And she has been a role model for self-advocacy. She was a role model then, she continues to be a role model today.

And so, our athletes now feel more comfortable about speaking out about mental health. And, as I mentioned before, we survey our athletes. And their responses, those are what dictate the resources that we put in place. We ask them specifically what they're looking for and then we cobble the resources to get those done.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: And when we talk about self-advocacy. How can anyone be a better self-advocate for their own work, for their own mental health, for their own heart. What would you recommend?

Li Li Leung, USA Gymnastics: Admittedly, this is something that I'm working on as well. And what I've told myself, though, is that it's okay to speak the truth. It's okay to be authentic to yourself. it's critical to not only your individual success, but sometimes self-advocacy is good for the greater good and good for the organization as well.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Is there maybe also a question where someone can ask, Hey, what's the worst thing that happens if I, if I, if I speak up, right? Because in this case, the worst thing that could happen if she didn't speak up was she could be horribly injured. But is this question of like, hey, you know what, what's, what's, what's the outcome? What's my output? What's the best, what's the worst thing that happens right now? Understand what you're afraid of. How important is that?

Li Li Leung, USA Gymnastics: I think it's important to not be afraid. And I know it's so much easier said than done. I think everyone feels fear in multiple different situations. But knowing that if you speak up, if you speak out, good can come from that. If you don't speak up and if you don't speak out, then things won't change. And so, you have to be okay and overcome that fear because what you're doing is a good thing and it will enable positive change.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: A lot of leaders talk about psychological safety and how important it is, and we certainly talked a little bit about that. But what are the ingredients that need to be in place?

I feel like it's elusive and it's a moving target. No one will ever have it perfect. But in your mind, if we were going to sort of have the ingredients for this on a list, what would it look like?

Li Li Leung, USA Gymnastics: It would look like a whole smattering and a portfolio and a library of resources. From our standpoint, it means making sure that the organization has a priority that safety is important. So that starts from the top. And then you have to build the policies that align with the priority of psychological safety. And then you need to build the processes in place that align with that as well. And then you need to have the resources in place to back that up, too.

So, it is this entire infrastructure that is interwoven through our entire ecosystem of our community. And sending the message that psychological safety is important. We hold people accountable if they are misbehaving, if they are not acting in a way and providing an environment where psychological safety is not happening. And so, it is this entire holistic approach to the holistic development of our athletes.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Lastly, Nadya Okamoto is a social entrepreneur who got her start founding a non-profit as a teenager that distributed tampons and menstrual pads to homeless women in San Francisco. That organization eventually grew to become one of the largest youth non-profits in the world: Period.org.

Nadya Okamoto, August: I think at times in my life, the biggest obstacle in my career has been burnout, has been conditioning myself to derive my self-worth from work and attachment to kind of the success that I found from external validation. And I'm very passionate about my work. I throw myself into it. I feel so connected to it, which also means that I really struggle to detach from it.

I mean, I've burned out to the point of being in like emergency rooms and residential rehab and not being able to get out of bed and having been strung up to IVs. And I think, you know, everything from capitalism to the model minority myth around Asian Americans conditions into me that like, rest is a waste of time and rest is a bad thing and it's not productive.

And I've gone to a place in my life of realizing like rest is like the most important thing in my entrepreneurial journey. I sleep 10 hours a night and work out once a day and eat really well and I think that that is what makes me the most productive person possible in my work.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: I was listening to your podcast, Tigress, and there was a really interesting conversation you had about girl boss culture, and you had mentioned that, hey, you kind of started period.org during this sort of influx of startup obsession that had happened, right? And the girl boss meme was very, very prevalent at the time.

And what was interesting to me about that is you said that, you know, hey this hustle culture, you work harder, longer, faster, that is the route to success. And that was a time where, for the first time, there really were more examples of women leaders. There really weren't that many CEOs. There aren't that women CEOs even now. And so that was an example to follow and then sort of leading to burnout that you had.

Can you talk a little bit about that experience of sort of seeing that and sort of saying, hey, this is the route to success, that example to follow. And what examples do you follow now?

Nadya Okamoto, August: I mean, I came into my career in 2014, which is kind of when girl boss culture was like at an all-time high, right? And I think it was all about hustle and, I mean, there were posters on the wall of every co-working space that said: “No sleep until I die” and, you know: “Work hard, play harder”.

And, you, know, I think that there was this celebration of put on a pantsuit, pull up a chair and just work. And we have to work 10 times as hard to get, you know, half as far. And it was all about working and working. And it's kind of like the myth of meritocracy, right? The more you work, not necessarily working smarter and more strategically, just the more you the better the outcome, right? And it was very much kind of labelling rest as, and joy, personal joy, as like a waste of time.

And I think I bought into that to the point where, like by my junior year of high school, I probably like every other month was fainting from exhaustion and going to the emergency room and the emergency nurses knew my name and my mom's name. And my mom kind of jokes about it now, like, oh, there's Nadia's hospital. But it was like, that was unfortunately a norm of mine. And everybody was saying, slow down, you don't need this. And I was just like, no, but this is like literally what it takes.

And I don't think that that's true at all. And if anything, like being exhausted doesn't make you the best leader, it makes you make mistakes and forget things and drop balls of what you're trying to juggle. And I think it's very different now. Now I prioritize my rest and I prioritize my boundaries because I recognize that, like, when I'm present and awake and energized, that's when I do my best work.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: If you were going to give advice to maybe another young founder who's kind of building, what are two or three ways that she could make sure that she's prioritizing joy along with this work?

Nadya Okamoto, August: I think the thing I would tell to any aspiring female entrepreneur is we can all recognize that this work is hard and, you know, the majority of startup businesses fail. And I think that the only way you can keep going is to take care of yourself because there is no mission and work that you dream of without you being able to do that long term.

I have so many friends who are still kind of coming back from burnout who started around the same time as me. And I think that I'm really proud of getting to a point of being able to rest and recognize my boundaries.

I think I would also kind of encourage young aspiring entrepreneurs to really find community with people they want to be like, right? I don't believe in having one mentor who you model everything after. I've never asked someone to be my mentor. But I think I look at everybody that I'm inspired by as mentors and people to learn from. And I think that I kind of pick and choose what I want to learn from each. And I think that I'm where I am today because I have that community, and that's what I would encourage other people to surround themselves with.

Surround yourself with people who challenge you, who question you, who push you to be better, more aware, and who inspire you not only in their work, but in their lifestyles.

Linda Lacina, Meet The Leader: Thanks so much to all of the leaders who shared their stories today. And thanks so much for listening. To find more podcasts, including my colleague's podcast, Radio Davos, go to wef.ch/podcasts.

This episode of Meet the Leader was produced and presented by me, with Jerry Johansson as editor, Juan Toran as studio engineer in Davos and Edward Bailly as studio engineer in New York, and Gareth Nolan driving studio production.

That's it for now. I'm Linda Lacina from the World Economic Forum. Have a great day.