What Now? From Exhausted to Brave — The Career Framework That Changes Everything

Detailed Transcript

 Welcome to this five part short series I am calling the “What Now” series. These five short episodes are designed to address the most common situations women like you are facing in your careers so that you can solve them now and build your brave career, a career where you stress less and you enjoy more. Where you work less and create more impact and yes, a career where you earn more.

 Welcome to the Build Your Brave Career Podcast, where we flip the script on the tired stereotype that women in and around the tech industry have to be stressed out, overworked and underpaid. I’m Nicole Trick Steinbeck, the International Bravery Coach and your host. Forget what you’ve been taught.

Bravery is not a personality trait available only to the brash bravery is a skill and you already have it, which is great because building the skill of bravery is the most powerful way to creating the career and life you really want as you build your brave. You will stress less, work less, and then earn more.

This podcast will help you do just that. Let’s dive in.

 We’re gonna start off with a question today: are you like many, many, many, many, many women at work feeling exhausted?

You’re not just tired. Or in need of rest or nap or good night’s sleep, or maybe even a long weekend.

No, you are exhausted.

The type of exhaustion that feels like your body is dragging through the day. Your mind can’t get a clear thought no matter how much pressure you put onto it. And coffee in your vein isn’t enough.

It’s the exhausted that has you doing the same things in the same way with the same people and getting the same, not- great results.

It’s that exhausted.

And yet when you truly get away from work, you do have a clear mind and you have some energy, and maybe even some creativity. If that’s you, this episode is for you. And if you think that might be you, this episode is for you.

You’re a mid-level woman with expertise and experience, and you’re capable and trusted, and you’re delivering and you are exhausted.

Maybe you’re even wondering, how can Nicole have so much energy right now? Does she not know what’s happening in the world?

I do. I do know what’s happening in the world and I care. And this episode is to address that exhaustion that you’re feeling because you know what got you here: the over-delivering, the high standards, the emotional labor, the constant availability.

You know that that made you successful in the past, but it is not working now.

In fact, it’s probably backfiring on you.

You’ve probably gotten some feedback that was less positive than you’ve gotten in the past. You’ve been seeing opportunities be reduced, your connections feel weaker. It’s not working, but you don’t see a clear way out.

What on earth is going on? This, my friend, is career exhaustion, and you’re headed into burnout.

That’s where the exhaustion cripples you, not just at work, but it steals the joy of your life too.

Today, let’s talk about it and let’s fix it. Because that exhaustion. It’s a signal for your future, and it can become a signal from your future.

I’m going to use the Build Your Brave Career framework to bring you in to how this phase of exhaustion can become the stepping stone, the bridge even, to the future career phase of energy and purpose and excitement and income.

Ah, let’s get there.

Listen, career exhaustion and burnout: they’re not just from working too much and they’re not the same thing.

Career exhaustion is, yes, it’s emotional exhaustion. It’s a reduced sense of accomplishment. It can begin to feel like a loss of identity in your work work. It’s knowing that something is wrong and being unable to find the space in your mind or in your calendar to address it.

Career exhaustion from the outside can often look like this: you are the reliable one, so you get more work. You care, so you take on more of the politics and the personal dynamics as a quote, “trusted partner.” You’re capable, so expectations and targets are high and perhaps keep rising, but somehow the recognition, the pay, the team size, the title, or maybe even simple appreciation isn’t manifesting. It doesn’t match.

In career exhaustion, this is where you try to fix it and the only way you’ve ever been taught. You work harder, you work longer, you work with more people, and you take on more meetings and you try another approach and another approach, and another tone, and a different tone, and a different approach and a different way of working and use, use AI to craft these emails with different tones.

Then you learn a new framework and you try to put that into place and you also become more efficient and you document more, and you communicate more, and you create more templates. All the new templates!

You push through. You push through the frustration, the disrespect, the extra hours of spending, the missed decisions, the misdirections, the missed support…

and when that keeps going, that’s when and how career exhaustion turns into actual burnout.

None of this is solved by doing more or thinking more or being more, it isn’t avoided that way either. Let me say that again.

Career exhaustion isn’t solved by doing the thinking or being more.

Career exhaustion is actually solved, and career burnout is avoided, by taking a very different approach. That approach requires bravery.

Whew. And here’s where I get to them at a level, because what you’re experiencing is not personal failure. You’re not exhausted because of you. This isn’t a you problem. It’s a systemic problem and it’s a long term systemic problem. And until we all have systemic solutions, all lost Star Trek.

Come on. You knew I was gonna bring Star Trek into this one.

Your solution is personal. It is individual, and it is building the skill of bravery.

Frequently, when you are in a career exhaustion phase, your brain is hitting you with, what should I do now? What should I do now? What should I do now? What should I do now? Why can’t I think? Why can’t I think? Why can’t I think? What’s going on? What’s going on? What’s going on? What are they doing? What are they doing? What are the????

As you can tell, those are not helpful questions, and all of the answers possible to all of those questions are creating more effort for you and more of the same results.

I wanna be really vulnerable here. I slip into this all the time too, whether it’s in my contracting, it’s in my own business, it’s in my parenting.

This is real. The secret is knowing how to get out of it and each time getting out of it with a little bit more ease.

That is where most of my clients start with all those questions, all that panic, and all that energy happening, and it exhausts them.

We work on questions that set you on the path towards resolution and a brave career.

You enjoy a career with less stress, less overwork, or no overwork, and eventually more income.

Questions like, who am I becoming? What does, does she, what does my future self want? What is keeping me exhausted? Who is keeping me exhausted?

Once you’re inside of career exhaustion, it will get worse.

You’ll keep being the one who carries too much and get blamed for it, and undermined by the people with less work, and a lot more time. And less expertise.

You will keep being rewarded with more work and more work and more work and more work, and then criticize when the quality goes down or the deadlines get missed.

You’ll keep trading your energy at ever higher rates for diminishing returns. From everything, from recognition to feedback, to connection, to income.

Finally, and most tragically, who you believe you are.

So stop asking the same questions. I hope that I’ve really drilled that in. Because we’re gonna start building your brave starting right now.

There are three parts to the Build Your Brave Framework, clarity, momentum, and Accountability.

The first step that we start with is clarity. ” Set clear specific goals and I share them with the people around me.”

But here’s the deal, when you’re exhausted, clarity doesn’t start with goals. It starts with honesty.

Honesty.

And an ever clearer understanding of what’s really driving your exhaustion. And spoiler, yes, you are part of the problem, but you aren’t the problem.

Let’s explore some questions that could help you and for me to be able to help you concretely, we would need to work one-on-one.

So we’re, this is a starting place and you can pause the episode and you can jot these down. But for you, I’ve got an offer for you at the end of this episode.

Here’s some questions: what specifically is exhausting me? Who steals my energy, my self-confidence? What am I tolerating that I am no longer willing to tolerate? Who am I working with that isn’t a good fit or shows me that they aren’t trustworthy? Where am I overfunctioning for others and pulling myself down? How does my job description match to my daily reality?

Whatever your answers are, you must be willing to see that some of your exhaustion is rooted in how you’re showing up and the choices you are making, not just in what’s being asked of you, how you’re being treated, et cetera.

It’s not blame. That’s power. That’s your power because once you see your part in the career exhaustion, you can change it.

I asked a few of my clients and I got some really funny, funny responses back. There are two I wanna share with you. One, her clarity statement with career exhaustion was, ” I’m exhausted because I’m doing my job and parts of other people’s job. My entire job feels like side quests, all side quests.”

Another one’s clarity statement said. ” I am wiped out because I watch how everyone emotionally responds. I can’t trust them to be adults and professionals in response to my expertise. I feel like I’m babysitting all day every day. “

Whew. I don’t know about you, but my goodness, those are two very big statements of clarity, and that’s where bravery begins.

When we have clarity, then we can go into momentum. And you already heard it in both of their statements. For momentum, the way I describe momentum is “I spend just as much time feeling my way to success as I do working towards it.”

That’s where most professional women get stuck. You’ve been taught: don’t feel, execute. Don’t slow down, just deliver.

But career exhaustion is a feeling problem. It’s a feeling problem, and it cannot be solved by just executing and just delivering and doing more. In fact, that’ll make it worse, like I already said.

Momentum in this case with career exhaustion might feel like and look like letting someone else struggle and not stepping in. Not responding immediately or at all. Saying, I’ll get back to you. Or letting other people experience your expertise and feel their insecurity, baby. Logging off when your work is done, even while others are still online.

And one of my favorites, blocking your calendar so you can actually get work done.

Yeah, all of this feels uncomfortable because part of your identity that, that you’re the person who can execute and deliver, and you’re capable and dah, dah, dah, dah. That now needs to be redefined.

If your value is based on over functioning, your exhaustion and your eventual failure is guaranteed.

Right now, if you’re feeling this, if, if this is speaking to you. I want you to choose one small brave shift: one boundary, one time to sign off, one calendar blocker, one no, one pause, one uncomfortable Silence, one exhale more. One.

When you have the clarity and you’re building the momentum, this is where you step into the third and final part of the framework: accountability.

This is where exhaustion turns into transformation. ’cause this part is all about the statement. I choose who I want to become and I do the work to become her. This is where you decide. Who do I want to become? How do I want to feel?

Not the not- exhausted version of you, but the brave version, the one who perhaps is calm and not reactive, clear instead of overextended strategic, and instead of constantly busy trusting instead of controlling.

This type of accountability also means more freedom and more self-confidence, because when you are practicing accountability on top of your momentum, found it in your clarity, you stop waiting for your company to fix it.

You stop waiting for your manager to notice or respond. You stop waiting for your workload to magically decrease, and you definitely start, stop waiting for other people to learn how to manage their own feelings.

You take ownership of your own experience.

You know, it looks in different ways.

Some of my clients have redefined their roles. For example, one of my clients redefined her role with herself, and then she let her manager know. It was in her job description, and she did her job, and she did her job very well. Exhaustion released and then eventually gone.

Another client stopped work on her time in her boundaries consistently in her time zone, regardless of when other people were working in their time zones.

The client who was on those perpetual side quests, her huge step in accountability was being a leader who allows and trusts others to be successful or not.

Sometimes the brave move isn’t leaving. It can be. A phase of career exhaustion. It can be about leaving. It can also be about growing who you are without abandoning yourself to exhaustion.

Let’s sum this up. If you’re in a career exhaustion phase. This is what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna get radically clear on what or who is actually exhausting you. You’re gonna make one small brave change in how you meet the situation, or this person or both, that is driving you towards exhaustion.

You’re gonna make those changes. Small, brave changes consistently. Then you’re gonna put heart and time and wisdom, and vision and curiosity and hope into choosing who you want to become. You’re gonna act accordingly, and you’re just gonna keep following the Build your Brave career framework.

That’s it. This is not a full life overhaul. It’s not a dramatic exit. It’s not a Hollywood closing. It’s one brave moment at a time as you reduce your exhaustion, reclaim your energy and craft your brave career.

Career exhaustion is not a permanent piece of your career. It’s a sign that you’re ready to grow.

I mentioned earlier I have a new offer that is short term. It’s designed specifically for women in this moment of 2026, which is a moment. It’s focused, it’s high impact. We’re gonna get clear, we’re gonna make brave aligned decisions, and we’re gonna make sure you start changing your experience immediately. ‘ cause you’ve been going through this alone and you don’t need to.

You can get support from a qualified, certified, experienced coach.

I’ve been there. I walk that path. I walk it with my clients as well. I’ve been in those trenches and I know how to help you come out of it and leap forward. The link to the offer is in the show notes. You can also just send me a message and I’ll get the information to you.

You do not have to keep doing this the hard way. You do not have to stay exhausted and let it turn into burnout for you to be successful. You can stress less, you can work less, and yeah, you can earn more. My clients do. It all starts with building your brave. So reach out.

 If the Build Your Brave Career Podcast is helping you flip the script in your own career, if it’s helping you reduce your stress, work smarter or create more income, please share this with a friend. Until next time, you are already brave. Now go build your brave.

 ​