Kirsty Ward spent 11 years as an RAF engineering officer, working on aircraft and armaments where precision wasn't optional. She was also, by her own account, on track for early promotion right up until chronic ill health and burnout took the choice out of her hands. She's now the founder of InTah, helping high performers build careers that don't require self-sacrifice.

We get into two things worth sitting with. Firstly, the resilience trap. Kirsty reframes resilience in a way that challenges the UK stiff upper lip mindset. Resilience is not endless endurance. It’s the ability to recover, stabilise, and step back early enough to see the real problem before you burn through your health.  Mistake one for the other and you end up treating your own toughness as the problem, pushing harder because pushing is what got you praised before. She calls it using resilience as a stick to beat yourself with. The trap isn't weakness. It's staying in the fight past the point where staying was ever the right call and not noticing until your body makes the decision for you.

Second: the boundaries that actually hold. Not willpower, but diary blocks treated like unmissable meetings, and a baseline built before you need it because by the time you're asking for help, you usually need it immediately.

We also talk about what it's like to lose a job title that used to answer the question "who am I," and what success looks like once you stop borrowing someone else's definition of it.

To find out more about InTah or get in touch with Kirsty find her on LinkedIn or Instagram. 

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