ALIGNMENT 101: Why Doing Everything ‘Right’ Still Leads to Burnout

Blake (00:03)
Real leadership. Real life. Real impact. No more choosing between your career and your life. Here you’ll find honest conversations, science-backed strategies, and inspiring stories to help you thrive at work and truly enjoy your life outside of it.

I’m your host Blake and I’m honored to help you create more impact with ease.

If you are a leader or professional who has spent years doing everything quote unquote right, but you are feeling tired, stressed, or more overwhelmed than ever, I want you to hear this clearly. You are not broken. You’re not failing and you’re not imagining it. What you are experiencing is misalignment. Leaders and experienced professionals do not burn out because they’re weak. You burn out because you’ve been trying to succeed while working against the very way that you are naturally wired to thrive. Often, for years, sometimes decades, and almost always without even realizing it.

Today, I’m gonna help you understand what alignment really is, how to recognize it, the neuroscience behind why it drains you, and the first step to shifting back into your natural pattern of success. And I wanna say this upfront, alignment is not some fluffy concept. Alignment is where your peace, purpose, and progress finally meet. It’s the missing piece you’ve been chasing your whole life. It’s the shift from just living to fully being alive. This episode is foundational. It’s the root of all the work I do with leaders and organizations.

Most people think alignment means finding work you love or having better balance, being happier, or taking more breaks. Those things can be results of misalignment, but they’re not alignment itself. Here’s the truth. Alignment is the state where how you think, work, solve problems, make decisions and live match how you are naturally wired to thrive. It’s not a feeling. It’s a functional state mentally, emotionally, neurologically.

And because of that alignment does something most people never experience. It gives you a life that feels like it’s working with you instead of against you. It brings your spark back. It’s the shift from just surviving to actually thriving. So what does alignment feel like? Alignment feels like clarity, grounded confidence, energy that lasts all day, creativity that comes naturally, the ability to shut your brain off, a deep sense that you’re on the right path, and work that feels energizing and easeful instead of draining.

When you’re aligned, you spend most of your time in flow, deep, immersive, energizing flow. Today, I spend about 85 percent of my life in that state, but in my corporate career, I got little glimpses, days or weeks here or there, and then it would slip away again. That’s often the cost of misalignment. We work harder and harder for less and less energy, fulfillment, and joy.

So why do leaders and professionals miss the sign? Well, we’re experts at overriding misalignment, pushing through exhaustion, friction, doubt, pushing through the feeling that something’s off because you always have. We often get rewarded for being the person who can handle anything, for being responsible, for getting it done. So if that’s you, when you start feeling unfulfilled or drained, you likely turn that frustration inward and tell yourself things like, I should be grateful. I just need to push through. Other people seem fine. Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe this is just, quote unquote, as good as it gets.

I know this because for years I told myself the exact same things. When I would talk to friends, family, or colleagues about how I felt, I was told that I should be grateful. I’m successful. Why am I not happy? So I started to believe that the problem was me, that I was somebody that maybe would never feel fully content. But the real issue was not my ambition, my discipline, or my drive. It was misalignment.

There’s another reason leaders miss the sign. Our nervous system learns to normalize survival mode. Not the dramatic version like panic attacks or breaking down in your car. Although with the worst forms of breakdown and burnout we can get there, I’m talking more about functionally staying in survival mode. And what that looks like, functional survival mode looks like overthinking, feeling scattered or overwhelmed, waking up tired, constant second guessing, no longer having that sense of passion or energy that you used to have, being productive and getting things done, but feeling internally drained or just not getting that same joy from it anymore.

Handling everything, but not feeling that true sense of deep joy. It’s so subtle that most leaders don’t even know they’re in it until it gets to be too difficult to ignore. They just think they’re really busy.

So let’s talk a little bit about the neuroscience of alignment. Because here’s what’s happening in your brain. When you work with your wiring and how your brain is naturally wired to work, your brain operates in its optimal zone. Clarity increases, creativity and innovation expands, decision making becomes much more effortless, and your nervous system stays regulated. But when you work against how you’re wired, even if you’re performing well, your nervous system actually interprets that as a threat.

It’s stressful. And so it shifts into survival mode. Survival mode often looks like responsibility, capability, and productivity until suddenly it looks like exhaustion, anxiety, and burnout. And here’s the part that still surprises most people. Your wiring will always win. Your subconscious drives 95 percent of your decision-making. And your nervous system, it is the first thing to react. And until you address both of those systems, they will run your life.

You can push against it for a season or even years. You can use willpower to try and change your habits through tactics and strategies. But in the end, your wiring will always win. And the cost then shows up in your health, your lack of energy, lack of clarity, your performance, your relationships, or honestly, every single area of your life.

There are three core forms of misalignment that create burnout cycles and really disconnect us from the passion, energy, joy, momentum, impact and flow that we really can have. Most people think they have one problem, but they actually are experiencing misalignments in all three areas. The first one is misaligned work. The second, misaligned beliefs. And the third, misaligned environment.

So let’s break them down.

Misaligned work is about doing work that’s not aligned with how you’re naturally wired to thrive or your unique fingerprint for success. Misaligned work is not just about it being the wrong job or the wrong manager. It might be the way that your work is structured, expectations that don’t go with how expectations that fight your natural pace or the way of which and sequence of which you do work best, responsibilities that contradict with how you are wired, or tasks that keep you in your weakest problem-solving zone.

It might be being placed in environments that require you to mute your passion when passion is part of how you’re naturally wired to create results, or being in execution-heavy roles when you’re built for strategy, or strategy-heavy roles when you thrive in implementation.

Here’s just one small example from my career. When I was placed into the newborn business at Target, and when I say the newborn business, think Carter’s, think Gerber. These are the things that you would buy if you were going to a baby shower, right? Packaged onesies and bibs and booties and all of those types of things. To be honest, when I first got moved to that role, I thought this is going to be a really boring job.

It was a business that typically only ran a two or 3 percent sales comp year over year. And the product only updated once a year with a small update at six months. I was used to at that point fashion that was constantly changing and constantly turning and driving high single digits or double digit growth year over year. And so when I went into this role, I went in sort of thinking there’s not going to be the same kinds of opportunities. And yet my mind was really blown because of how I naturally am able to see the gold in people, opportunities and businesses and really start brainstorming about what is possible and then look at data and facts to be able to actually identify where those opportunities are.

Look at the market and then be able to really realize based on the goal, based on what we have and what’s misaligned, how do we reconfigure to truly win and optimize? My brain is really great at seeing patterns, connecting the dots in ways other people can’t, and really understanding human psychology and behavior. Because of that, I actually found opportunity everywhere.

One of the biggest surprises came for me when I started to look at the business. The business had two very long Pog walls. If you don’t know what a Pog wall is, it’s essentially a wall with a bunch of little pegs where you hang things. And it was actually set up by brand. But when I started researching and understanding, I really started thinking like a customer. And the very first thing I thought was, well, if you have a friend who’s pregnant and they have a baby registry, the first thing you want to find out is where they registered. And then the next question you ask yourself is, is it a boy? Is it a girl? Or I don’t know.

And then from there, you start looking at the list on the registry and you start figuring out based within your budget, what are the options that will put together a great gift? Well, when I looked at the baby business at Target, what I saw was that it was all organized by brand, but nobody’s shopped newborn apparel by brand. They were really shopping by gender first and then by the price point and how to put together the best gift for that.

So by being able to really leverage my strengths, I was able to see opportunities in this business nobody had seen. And because I have a gift of being able to use data and history to find strategies that consistently drive sales growth and profit growth and improvement across the board, I was able to really look at that, come up with a strategy, convince the leadership team inside Target, as well as the vendors, to shift how we were merchandising the product and to really put the product in the forefront in the way that customer shopped, which was by gender.

It was amazing opportunity where we found over 30 million dollars of upside opportunity. And we really shifted a business that had been pretty consistent over and over and over again, where that opportunity wasn’t really seen. But because of how I’m naturally wired, I was able to come into a role that really enabled me to work at my best. That’s what aligned work looks like. You can create exponential results with significantly less effort.

The second area of misalignment is in our beliefs and conditioning. And this layer is really internal.

I don’t know if you know this, but I found it really fascinating years ago when I started to study this that every single one of our beliefs are formed by the time that we are seven years old. And our brains are not fully functioning that young. So every single thing that happens in our environment as a child, we take blame for or we think we’re responsible for.

So for example, if you had a mom who was a really busy working mom and she came home frustrated and agitated and angry at six or seven years old, you wouldn’t be able to see that maybe she was frustrated or angry because she was overwhelmed or overworked or she felt responsible or she felt like she was failing as a mom. Instead, what you would see is I must have done something wrong. And then you would have formed belief systems like if I’m a good girl and I take care of things in the house, then my mom will be happy and then I will be safe.

So every single one of us, based on how our brains are literally wired to work, grow up with these belief systems that form really, really early in our childhood. And in most cases, they’re invisible to us. We actually don’t even know what those underlying belief systems or conditioning are, but they do continue to drive our life. And so the things that we did as children to be praised, get love, be accepted, and become the foundation of how we’re hardwired to achieve and to live our lives.

Well, when you put those in environments where some of those childhood belief systems or those conditioning get triggered, it can create some really challenging experiences. And those belief systems can end up silently driving you into survival mode. Beliefs like hard work equals my worth as an individual. If I slow down, everything will fall apart. I need to prove myself. Being successful just requires a lot of sacrifice. If my boss isn’t happy with my work, I’m in danger.

These types of beliefs drain far more energy than any job ever could. They’ll keep you over-functioning, performing instead of leading, or caught in a cycle of feeling like there’s no way out. And ultimately, they get us trapped in these cycles of exhaustion that we feel like we can’t break.

The amazing thing about beliefs and conditioning is that it’s so much easier to actually remove and replace beliefs than almost any of us know. So much of what we’ve heard around belief systems and conditioning often is through an old therapy lens where people spend years talking about the past and what’s happened to them. And in fact, talk therapy has been shown in many cases to actually further ingrain those beliefs.

But instead, there’s far more powerful ways to actually be able to shift and see that some of the beliefs that are driving your life that you were even completely unaware of. To be able to see that those aren’t true and shift and replace them with beliefs that are far more impactful, far more powerful and far more helpful for you.

Perfectionism is one of the biggest ones that held me back and holds back so many of my clients, as well as fear of not wanting to ask for help because you don’t want to be a burden or you feel like you should know something. These are just a few of the really common beliefs that often stand in our way, but are things that we don’t have to keep trying to override or force our way through, we can actually clear them out entirely and experience such a sense of freedom.

And the third area of misalignment is misaligned environment.

Now, most people think misaligned environment means I need to leave my company, but that’s not necessarily true. You know, when I started my earlier business, the Bridge to Fulfillment, I had so many people coming to me feeling like maybe I have to change industries or change companies and what I’m doing isn’t sustainable or I’m not fulfilled anymore and I need to do something different. And sometimes that was the case that they really did need to be doing different work or in a different environment.

But a lot of the time it was really that they needed to get an alignment and they needed a different way to lead and live. And through that we’re really able to unlock all of the things that they had really wanted but believed that the only way to get there was by changing jobs.

And here’s something we often don’t talk about. There’s so much discussion about toxic or unhealthy workplaces or cultures or bosses. Environments though are actually created by people and often people in survival mode end up creating negative cultures without even realizing it. Because stress makes good leaders reactive. Chaos makes good teams unpredictable and value misalignment can take even a great job and make it feel unsafe.

The reality is if you grew up needing to make difficult people happy or tying your worth to your performance, certain environments do not just create stress, they recreate old emotional patterns. We all repeat what we don’t understand or what we haven’t learned yet. That’s why misaligned environments can feel so personal even when they’re not.

It’s also why I see so many people leaving companies or bosses thinking it will be better next time. But if you don’t resolve the root cause, if you don’t learn how to ensure that no matter what’s going on around you, that you can maintain what you need for peace, stability, balance, then you will keep getting those lessons over and over and over again.

The good news is you can solve this once and for all at the root cause. And the good news is if there are misalignments in environment, often by really being able to understand what it is that you need, you can make small but very significant changes in how you’re working in your current job. And then with the people that you’re working with, you’d be amazed at the impact that you can make just by making some of those small changes on your own.

Because when you understand your wiring, you can often shift an environment in small but very transformative ways. And then it begins to have a ripple effect of those around you.

So let’s talk about what does alignment feel like? Let me bring it to life for you. One of my clients, Evan, was a very successful entrepreneur. He had been highly successful for years, worked with so many top coaches in so many different arenas. And yet he kept going through cycles of burnout, getting really, really sick and frustrated that he felt like there was more that he wanted to accomplish.

He wanted to tap into more purpose-driven work. He wanted to continue to grow. But he kept finding himself exhausted, overextended, pulled in too many directions, not really having the support that he really needed. And ultimately he was living in functional survival mode.

He didn’t need a bunch of tools or tactics or hacks or another productivity system. What he really needed was alignment. He needed to get to the root cause of why he kept going through these cycles and be able to shift that so he could finally step fully into his potential and the things he really wanted to accomplish. Within just a couple of weeks of working together, I was really able to work with him to uncover patterns that had been draining him for decades.

Once we were able to shift his belief, rewire the pattern and give him deep clarity on the right next step to take, everything changed. Within two weeks of that call, he was able to free up 20 hours a week of his time and new opportunities started opening to him effortlessly. His health improved, his relationships strengthened, his business went from being very dependent on him to being able to run without him. He felt alive and engaged in his life again.

That is the power of alignment. It truly does give you your life back.

So today I wanna leave you with one simple shift. Get curious about what’s going on in your life, not critical. I can tell you after doing this work for years that 90 to 95 percent of the friction, stress and anxiety that you are feeling every day is actually solvable. And it doesn’t require blowing up your life, sacrificing your income, or spending years in therapy.

It requires understanding how you’re naturally wired to thrive. Every single moment of friction, stress, or anxiety is data and a lesson to be learned. Every energy drain is teaching you something. And every loop of second guessing is an opportunity to begin to uncover what are the beliefs or conditioning that are keeping me stuck. Instead of judging it, get curious, because curiosity is the first step towards alignment.

And alignment is how you shift from just getting through to fully being alive.

If today’s episode resonated with you, the best next step to take is to take the burnout type quiz. It’ll reveal where you’re misaligned and why. And it’s the fastest way to start to understand some of the root causes of your stress, exhaustion, or lack of clarity. And if through listening to this, you’re realizing you have been working against your natural wiring and you’re misaligned and you want personalized support to uncover your unique fingerprint for success and to get in alignment, my one-to-one coaching is designed for directors, senior levels, executives, and founders who want clarity, energy, and meaningful impact without burnout.

And if you lead a team or organization, my workshops and leadership development programs help you understand and resolve misalignment so you can perform at your best.

We were never meant to burn out. We’re meant to lead with energy, clarity, purpose and ease. And alignment is where your peace, purpose and progress finally meet.

Thank you for spending time with me today. If this episode helped you, please share it with a friend or leader who needs it. Make sure you’re subscribed so you never miss an episode. Until next time, lead with intention and create your impact with ease.

Most successful people don’t realize they’re in burnout because stress and exhaustion have become so normalized. But burnout is actually a sign of deeper misalignment between how you’re wired to thrive and how you’re actually working and living. Fix the misalignment and everything changes.

Take the free quiz at ImpactWithEase.com forward slash burnout dash type to discover your burnout type and get next steps to reclaim your energy, lead with confidence and create more ease in your life and career.