Something's broken in the world of business.
Why are so many capable, senior people feeling burned out, stressed and frankly, not happy?
Safe Work Australia's reports that mental health conditions accounted for 12 percent of all serious workers' compensation claims in 2023–24. That's a 14.7 percent jump on the previous year – and a 161 percent increase on a decade ago.
The HR and people leaders among us know this first-hand, but time lost from work for a mental health claim is almost five times longer than for other injuries and diseases.
Five times.
Zoom out and the picture holds. The Australian Bureau of Statistics' , still the most recent national data available, found 21.5 percent of Australians aged 16 to 85 had experienced a mental disorder in the previous 12 months. Anxiety was the most common, at 17.2 percent. Roughly one in five people at your all-hands.
So when I’m briefed by a client that they need my keynote or session to reinvigorate a flat sales and marketing team, or an L&D lead says their execs aren’t turning up for the training sessions, I’m hearing that with a high NQ and deep empathy for institutional indicators of burnout.
Are we actually in control?
You're probably familiar with Stephen Covey's circles model from The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
In the middle sits everything you directly control. What you wear, what you eat, and what you really think about that meeting which should have been an email.
Moving out, we've got the Circle of Influence. The people and situations you can shape but not command. You can speak well, lead well, and act in ways that inspire those around you. When we're at our best, it can feel like your team really is with you on this journey.
Then there's the Circle of Concern – or as I call it, the Circle of No Control. Wars, politics, climate change and people who have forgotten how to use an indicator when changing lanes.
Now, here's an important point, “listening ears on” as we’d say to our kids when they were younger:
Burnout is not a disease. But it is a powerful psychological experience that overwhelms your heart, mind and soul.
Heavy feet. A sense that nothing matters or is worth fighting for. Loss of energy and hope for good things to come.
Sorry, we're back in the unhappy place here. Stay with me, because the interesting part is the script voiceover playing underneath.
In my experience coaching senior leaders, the exhaustion is rarely the whole story. Underneath it runs a narrative – and it's remarkably consistent. I should be coping better than this. Everyone else has it sorted. If I say something, it'll cost me. And those internal narratives are often built on a series of one-off stories over the course of your life that the brain retained because at the time, they sparked a fight or flight response.
That's the self-talk layer. And it's the layer most corporate wellbeing programs never touch, because it's invisible in an engagement survey and it doesn't show up until someone resigns, or “melts down” in a meeting as an expression of burnout.
The turnaround starts when you challenge the narrative, and rebuild it with evidence that is also stored in memory – but it’s evidence of achievements, evidence of good times, evidence of overcoming, evidence of character and capability.
Narrative intelligence, or NQ. In its simplest definition, it's your ability to connect the dots and intentionally tell stories that influence others, starting with the story you tell yourself. NQ is the internal, self-talk-driven story that turns IQ and EQ into action.
For an old journo like me, this is familiar ground. Hearing one story that’s being told to me via a press release, a well-trained spokesperson or a stage, and identifying past moments that are dissonant or aligned with that – often joining those dots creates the news.
Turns out leaders need to be honing the skills required to do the same thing, especially when AI is making so many great- and not-so-great sounding promises: sharp NQ relies on pattern recognition, trend-spotting, then telling stories that bridge what I call the Vision-Reality Gap.
Why the AI conversation makes it worse
There's an uncomfortable undercurrent running through every conversation about AI and the future of work – a dominant narrative, if you will.
Three of them, actually. Inevitability, replacement and helplessness.
None of these are strategies. They're stories. And they're doing enormous quiet damage inside organisations right now because a workforce that believes its future is already decided doesn't bring you its best thinking.
Popular narratives are always crafted by storytellers with an agenda. Which means they can be rewritten by other storytellers with a different, hope-filled agenda.
That's you, by the way.
This too shall pass
Let me reward your attention with the part I most want you to hear.
Any feeling of burnout, stress or existential overwhelm you're carrying right now won't last. “This too shall pass,” as they say. In fact, it gets way better.
I've been through my own dark nights of the soul and come back a happier, healthier person by rewriting the stories I’d been telling myself. So I can say this with clear conviction. The dip into darkness doesn't have to be the end. In fact, it's most often the catalyst for a new season.
Every hero in every book ever has faced this exact moment. Go forward, or give up and retreat.
They choose to go forward with courage and a tinge of fear, which is why I love to say, “onwards”.
The difference is what happens in that moment of recommitment. Heroes like Frodo discover what Joseph Campbell teaches in The Hero's Journey. A personal revelation about who they are and who they're supposed to be, then a reckoning Campbell calls atonement. Letting go of old attachments and becoming "at one" with what's next.
It's heavy stuff. Ironically it feels light when you find it.
Been there, done that, still carrying the battle scars.
What this means if you're programming an event
Here's the practical translation for the people who book me as a keynote speaker or workshop leader.
If you're an in-house L&D or HR leader, the gap in most leadership development right now is self-talk. Give leaders a repeatable tool for catching the story running underneath the exhaustion and you move them from awareness to capability, from confusion to clarity.
If you're an event organiser, my Humans Required and Rewrite Your Future sessions will both see delegates talking together more openly and vulnerably afterwards. Because someone finally named the thing everyone was carrying into the room, as a gap, a Vision-Reality Gap, a bruise to their ability to believe in the stories their role expects them to tell.
We get extra practical in my Rewrite Your Future keynote and sessions. Leaders catch the inner critic, name the limiting belief, and use the Mirror Moment© live in the room. Catch. Flip. Hold. Then they rebuild the real story with evidence, not affirmations.
The premise I explain is that under pressure, leaders don't rise to the occasion. They fall back on their story. So they need to choose and write what story they’re going to build back up from.
It's the same four-stage system I set out in The Story Code™. Challenge, Overwrite, Decide, Encode. Beliefonomics™ makes the economic case for belief as the hidden engine of performance. The Story Code™ is the framework that puts it to work.
So here's to your story
If you're planning a conference, a leadership offsite or an internal program for 2027, and you know your people are running on empty, let's talk about what your room actually needs.
Have a look at , or see how I work with rooms as an . If you'd rather just have a conversation about what your leaders are carrying, and we'll start there.
Onwards.
SOURCE NOTES
Verified and safe to publish as written
1. Safe Work Australia, Key Work Health and Safety Statistics Australia 2025: mental health conditions were 12% of all serious claims in 2023–24; a 14.7% increase on 2022–23; a 161% increase on 10 years ago; median time lost almost 5 times longer than other injuries and diseases. High confidence, quoted verbatim from the Safe Work Australia media release. Link live.
2. ABS, National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing 2020–22: 21.5% of people aged 16–85 had a 12-month mental disorder; anxiety most common at 17.2%. High confidence. Now cited by year and flagged in-text as the most recent national data available. The "one in five people at your all-hands" line is my rounding of 21.5%.