Ever find yourself staring at a screen, mind blank, your brain basically flatlining?
I went through a season where the drive to work was a depressing experience. Was this my lot in life? Going to and from an office, a never-ending list of incomplete goals, a persistent sense of existential failure?
If you’ve been there, you know, it’s frightening. For me, having grown up with no history of mental health difficulties, indeed, as I share in my book, I grew up with, “incredibly loving, stable parents” and “a happy, largely untroubled childhood” - I had no roadmap for what ended up being an active spiral into clinical burnout in my 40s.
What do I mean by “clinical burnout”? The World Health Organisation classifies it in the ICD-11 as an “occupational phenomenon” – not a medical condition, but a “syndrome... resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” In other words: it's more than a catchphrase for being tired and overworked. It goes deeper than that.
And here’s the thing you might not know. Australia is a hotbed of burnout. We’re one of the most exhausted, mentally stressed nations in the world.
Some corners of the workforce are copping it worse than others. According to UNSW Business School’s BusinessThink, healthcare, project management and technology roles currently report the highest burnout rates across Australia – and the national bill runs to an estimated $39 billion a year in lost productivity, absenteeism and turnover. Women are especially exposed: the 2025 Women’s Agenda Ambitions Report, backed by AGSM @ UNSW Business School, found 72 percent had experienced burnout in the past 12 months. (unsw.edu.au/businessthink)
A people2people Recruitment study in February 2025 said two in five employees (40 percent) expected their stress levels to rise that year. Half those surveyed said if they were offered “burnout leave”, they’d take it.
Infinite Potential’s State of Workplace Burnout 2025 report says burnout rates in Australia are at 43 percent, up from 17 percent from 2024.
And it’s not slowing down. A later 2025 Beyond Blue community poll found half of Australian workers had experienced burnout in the past year, with those aged 18–29 hit hardest by unmanageable workloads and a lack of management support. As Beyond Blue CEO Georgie Harman AO put it: “Burnout is never a personal failing – it’s the result of someone facing too many demands, for too long, without enough support.” (beyondblue.org.au)
Why? A mixture of unrealistic job demands, short-termism among leaders that drive stress, and the big one: psychological safety. Many of us don’t feel like it’s safe to express a contrary or negative opinion at work.
Psychological safety in the workplace is not as easily understood as traditional pressures at work like understaffing, long hours, AI transformation projects and ever-shifting goal posts.
Ironically I suspect it can be hard to accurately measure because surveys and direct questions from management could feel like a trap! If your workplace is not known as particularly caring, the savvy worker could suspect being critical was a career limiting move.
There’s a name for this in the research: value dissonance. Michael Leiter, the organisational psychologist who co-created the Maslach Burnout Inventory – the tool most used worldwide to measure burnout – argues burnout is more about value conflicts than it is about work demands. It traces back to Leon Festinger’s 1957 theory of cognitive dissonance: when what you’re required to say, sell or defend at work drifts from what you actually believe, the mismatch doesn’t just create friction. It accumulates as chronic strain, and over time we either change the belief or change the behaviour to make the discomfort stop.
It’s a particular hazard for communicators. Research into press, radio and television professionals found they routinely have to promote messages “independently of their opinion, sometimes far from their beliefs” – a daily exercise in narrative dissonance that tracks with burnout as strongly as workload does.
This is where narrative intelligence earns its keep. If burnout is partly a story-integrity problem – the gap between the story you’re required to tell and the story you actually believe – then closing that gap, even by an inch, is protective. That’s not therapy. It’s editorial discipline applied to your own life: knowing which parts of your public story are genuinely yours, and which are borrowed scripts you’re reciting because the job demands it.
Where to now?
Writing The Story Code for Leaders meant digging into research and interviewing therapists, psychologists and workplace wellbeing researchers who spend their careers in this territory – not to diagnose burnout, but as a foundation for me to understand how the stories we tell ourselves may be impacting the national crises.
A few notable experts whose perspective shaped my thinking include:
- Dr Carol Dweck, psychologist and author of Mindset – the first step is realising your beliefs aren’t fixed in stone. They evolve, just like everything else about you. What stood out to me, as I share in Chapter 5, is her one-word fix: ‘yet’ – as in, I can’t do this yet. It’s what helped me stop believing I wasn’t a ‘real’ entrepreneur.
- David Newman, narrative therapist at Sydney Narrative Therapy – new, healthier stories get their strength from being witnessed and retold by others, not from figuring them out alone. As David told me, and I share in Chapter 7: “New stories get strength by being witnessed by others, being retold by others… It can be incredibly powerful in strengthening new stories.”
- Hal and Sidra Stone, psychologists and creators of the Voice Dialogue process – your inner critic isn’t the enemy. It developed to protect you from shame, and naming it as a distinct ‘sub-personality’ can loosen its grip. They nailed the idea of the inner critic as a misguided protector rather than a punisher, as I explore in Chapter 4.
For those of us without degrees in this area, I’ve got just one simple test – the horizon test. Where is your horizon?
That is, how far ahead are you looking in work and life? Can you picture a future horizon where your ideas, dreams or goals are going to be fulfilled? You’re energised by the idea. It might be like the early days of your career when you realised you had incredible growth potential, financially and professionally.
In this horizon, your horizon is clearly a long way off. You’re visionary, excited and driven. Life feels great. And like driving on a long, straight highway, when you look far down the road you can also see what’s right in front of you. From a wellbeing perspective, it doesn’t get much better than this!
Ok, now park that idea.
At the other extreme is a very limited horizon. In fact, if you’re experiencing high levels of stress and burnout your horizon could be as near as the next room.
At the peak of my own burnout and mental wellbeing crisis in 2019 my horizon was the ensuite bathroom. Lying in bed, it felt like the bathroom was about as far as I could go. I thought about the day ahead in hours and minutes. I wasn’t being ‘present’ in the healthy sense. I just couldn’t do much more than think about the next best thing – and even that was an effort.
Plotting your horizon
It’s not a scientific way of plotting your own horizon on this test, but I don’t think you’ll find it too difficult.
Close your eyes and picture where your horizon sits. How far into the future are you thinking and dreaming?
For you, it might be ideas for the week ahead, goals for the month and the quarter – for the next 5, 10, 50 years? Or maybe the horizon is much closer: if you can just get through these next few days that’ll be an achievement?
Take action
Now, if you’ve realised your horizon is uncomfortably close it’s likely time to take action – immediately.
Call someone, text a friend. Go for a walk. Stop whatever you’re doing and think about what needs to change.
Next best steps might include calling:
- Lifeline – 13 11 14
- The Black Dog Institute –
- Beyond Blue – 1300 224 636
- Gotcha4Life –
- Emergency – 000
The near horizon
If your horizon is a bit further ahead to the weeks and months, even better to years, you’re likely in a good position to start flexing and building nascent narrative intelligence muscles and getting clarity around whether that’s the way you want your story to evolve.
Write a list of all the pressures you’re facing. How long is that list?
What stories are you telling yourself about your current situation? We can often have an internal narrative that sounds like: “I have to keep going to prove myself,” or “If I stop, I’ll fall behind.”
It’s tempting to believe they’re necessary ideas to keep up the hustle of busy working life. But narratives like this also keep you stuck and feeling out of control of your choices.
When I was researching The Story Code for Leaders and this idea of applying brand storytelling principles to the stories we tell ourselves, one of my first insights was how often we accept the headline fed to us if we trust the source. Quite often we simply accept our internal narratives, the inner critic, as if it were the ABC or New York Times.
My view now is maybe we should regard our inner critic like Buzzfeed News or Fox News, instead. And like a good reporter, ahem, as I like to think I am, it’s our job to find the truth then cite evidence and sources to back up the new story.
For example, a set of experiences over time could lead you to start thinking of yourself as a victim: ‘This kind of thing always happens to me” or “I don’t have what it takes anymore” or “my future is uncertain now AI is taking our jobs”.
If this is you, a technique I write about in Chapter 5: take a limiting belief and go looking for evidence of its opposite. Mirrored, “it’s too late to change” becomes “it’s not too late” – and we build a case for it with evidence from your lived story. Dweck would say a belief isn’t fixed; it’s one ‘yet’ away from evolving. Newman would say a new story doesn’t need to be finished to take hold, only witnessed and retold.
One time I witnessed a story pre-flip was with a former boss. In my exit interview, he confessed how impressed he was at my decision to take a new career direction – at the time, into theological studies with freelancing on the side. For him, it was “too late” to change, he said. His near-term horizon was limited, tinged with perhaps, a touch of his own meta resignation. It surprised me, given how revered he was in the publishing world, that he’d told himself that story.
If I could have a ‘Back to the Future’ moment I’d want to put the Mirror Mindset™ at work for him twenty years prior to that conversation. In my keynotes we talk about challenging the voice of your Inner Critic and tuning in to what your Inner Coach might say instead.
I teach techniques in our workshops to flip the script, from “This kind of (bad) thing always happens to me”, TO “I’ve jumped bigger hurdles in my life than this.” Or FROM, “I don’t have what it takes anymore”, TO “I’m a strong Navigator and can figure out what I need for what’s next.” FROM “My future is uncertain now AI is taking our jobs”, TO “I’ve evolved my skills before I can do it again; Humans are Required.” It’s a simple structure. But if we let the Inner Critic go unchallenged, the story becomes a narrative, and an embedded narrative is much more difficult to untangle in our neurones.
In my boss’s case, his story wasn’t “too late.” It was “not yet.”
Burnout is a beginning, not the end
What about you? Let me encourage you: change is possible. I’ve seen it many times over and experienced a radical change in my own life.
So it’s time to flip the script. Burnout isn’t the end of your story. It’s a signpost you can’t ignore. It’s telling you something needs to change, so don’t ignore it.
Maybe today’s the day you stop striving and start exploring what it looks like to start rewriting your story? Or maybe you’re inspired to transform 100s of professionals in one place, at one time, with a memorable keynote experience at your next event? Either way, I’m here for it, and it’s the professional privilege of my life so far to help others experience the flip from confusion to clarity by rewriting the stories they tell themselves.
Onwards.