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You can't outwork your wounds. That is the one lesson underneath everything else in this season.

The fall was Part 1. The surrender was Part 2. This is Part 3, and the last episode of Season 1. I close the personal story and look back at what the season turned out to be: what Reset actually looked like, which was the slow and frequently boring work of rebuilding a life on different terms, and the start of Reinvent, where the question stops being how do I get back to who I was and becomes who am I now.

It is also a thank you, to the guests and to everyone who showed up for Season 1.

• What Reset looked like in practice, without the tidy arc
• Where Reinvent begins, and why the question changes
• The one lesson that holds the season together

Season 1, Episode 21

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

The actual moment of surrender is not cinematic. It is 4am, a work laptop, and an email that says I can't come in.

Part two of my three part burnout story is about what came after the collapse. What asking for help really looked like, rather than how it sounds when people describe it afterwards. What psychiatry, psychotherapy and rehabilitation actually gave me. And what burnout showed me about myself once I finally stopped running from it.

This is for anyone who has hit their limit and is trying to work out what recovery involves, past the tidy version.

• What asking for help actually looked like, in practice
• What psychiatric care, psychotherapy and rehabilitation each did
• What stopping made visible that running had kept hidden

Season 1, Episode 20

Content note: this episode contains honest discussion of burnout, psychiatric care, and a serious physical health event. If you feel unsafe or unable to cope right now, please contact local emergency services or a crisis support line. Crisis lines by country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Burnout does not start at work. Mine started in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

Growing up somewhere the world could shift without warning, I learned quietly, without anyone teaching me, to stay braced, stay useful and stay small. I carried that into every room I walked into for the next thirty years.

This is part one of a three part personal story, and it traces the patterns that drove me: the fear underneath the ambition, the coping that turned into its own problem, and the moment I could not hold it together any longer.

• What the wiring was, and where it came from
• The fear underneath the ambition, and what it kept producing
• The coping that quietly became the problem

Season 1, Episode 19

Content note: this episode discusses a bomb explosion, burnout, mental health and alcohol dependency. Please look after yourself first. If you feel unsafe or unable to cope right now, please contact local emergency services or a crisis support line. Crisis lines by country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_suicide_crisis_lines

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

If the first half was about recognising the pattern, this one is about where it came from and what starts to change it.

Chris Wilson continues with Alina Meyer-Riad into the psychology underneath work addiction: perfectionism, people pleasing, fear of failure, and the early conditioning that taught people their worth arrives through output.

They also talk about what reaching out actually does, what resilience means once you stop using it to mean endurance, and the small practices that build boundaries around work without requiring anyone to hate their job.

• Feeling worthy only through work, and where that gets learned
• Why reaching out matters more than any technique
• Small practices that support healthier boundaries, without shame or self blame

Season 1, Episode 18

Part 1 covers what work addiction is and why it is so hard to spot.

Connect with Alina Meyer-Riad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amrresilienzstaerken/ and https://www.amr-resilienz-staerken.de/

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membership

Website: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com/community

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Work addiction is harder to spot than most patterns, because it is the one that gets rewarded.

In the first half of a two part conversation, Chris Wilson sits down with Alina Meyer-Riad to work out what work addiction actually is and why it stays misunderstood. They get into the difference between working hard and having lost control of it, the way validation and output start standing in for identity, and how hustle culture makes the whole thing look like a virtue.

This may land for anyone whose sense of their own worth has quietly attached itself to what they produce.

• What separates working hard from something that has taken over
• How reward and dopamine keep reinforcing the overworking
• The early signs that work is occupying more space than you chose

Season 1, Episode 18

Part 2 goes into where these patterns come from, and what recovery and healthier boundaries look like.

Connect with Alina Meyer-Riad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amrresilienzstaerken/ and https://www.amr-resilienz-staerken.de/

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Burnout is not only about work. Plenty of people carrying emotional exhaustion are also carrying a load outside the workplace that keeps it going, even when the job itself is not that bad.

This solo episode covers the stressors that sit outside the office and the personal patterns that make them heavier: perfectionism, people pleasing, fear of failure, and the running commentary of negative self talk.

It also covers the practical ones nobody counts as burnout risk, like money worries, caring for someone, broken sleep, loneliness, and being permanently reachable.

• Perfectionism, people pleasing, and where the fear underneath them comes from
• Financial stress, role overload, and caregiving, and why they compound
• Small realistic steps when you are stretched in every direction at once

Season 1, Episode 17

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

If burnout has left you exhausted and questioning yourself, working out when to ask for help, and what kind, is its own problem on top of the first one.

Psychotherapist Claudia Bayer joins Chris Wilson again to look at the options people reach for in burnout recovery: therapy, coaching, and peer support. Not to rank them, because they do different jobs and the right one depends on what is actually happening for you. They cover how the three differ, what stops people asking at all, and the signs that what you are dealing with needs a qualified professional rather than any of this. Claudia is Head of Psychotherapy at Lebens.Resort Ottenschlag and runs a private practice in Vienna.

- How to recognise when burnout needs professional support

- What actually separates therapy, coaching and peer support

- The barriers that keep people from asking, long after they have noticed

Season 1, Episode 16

A reflection to sit with: what kind of support have you been avoiding, and why?

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membership

Website: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Burnout recovery is not only about getting better. It is about understanding what keeps standing in the way of staying well.

Chris Wilson and organisational psychologist Dr Ben Searle continue through the six obstacles that make recovery so complicated, taking the last four: shame, health, emotion, and the symptoms of burnout themselves. Shame keeps people quiet. Depression, anxiety and physical exhaustion overlap with burnout in ways that are genuinely hard to untangle. Grief and anger turn up, and so does the loss of who you used to be at work.

And the symptoms make the recovery harder to do.

• Why shame keeps people silent, and what that silence costs
• How to tell when something underneath burnout is slowing recovery down
• Why small consistent changes do more than trying to fix yourself

Season 1, Episode 15

Part 1 covers the situational and knowledge obstacles.

Connect with Dr Ben Searle: https://mindonthejob.com/ben-j-searle/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-searle-3a0a1b1/

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

Burnout recovery is not as simple as taking time off. For a lot of people it feels harder than the burnout did.

Chris Wilson is joined by Dr Ben Searle, organisational psychologist, consultant and host of the Mind on the Job podcast, to work through why recovery stalls. This first part covers the obstacles that arrive early: circumstances that make real rest impossible regardless of intention, and the gaps in what people know about burnout, including people who work on it professionally.

They also get into guilt, and the way over responsibility quietly cancels out rest.

• Why recovery can feel harder than the burnout that caused it
• The situational and knowledge obstacles that slow things down
• Why even specialists struggle to apply to themselves what they teach

Season 1, Episode 15

Connect with Dr Ben Searle: https://mindonthejob.com/ben-j-searle/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-searle-3a0a1b1/

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.

What happens when the workplace you believed in turns toxic, and can HR lead the change when it is caught between the people and the power?

Karin Kradischnig, HR expert and founder of Coaching4HR, returns to talk with Chris Wilson about what surviving a toxic culture actually takes, and what reforming one takes after that.

With twenty years in HR and leadership behind her, she is candid about organisational dysfunction, about rebuilding trust once it has gone, and about the nerve required to challenge a system while you are still inside it and dependent on it.

• The early signs of a toxic workplace, and how they get explained away
• What working inside a culture of fear or control does to a person over time
• How accountability and psychological safety turn into actual cultural change

Season 1, Episode 14

Connect with Karin Kradischnig: https://www.kradischnig.at/ (German) and https://www.linkedin.com/in/karin-kradischnig/

Share. Inspire. Explore. is the podcast from Where I'm At, honest conversations on burnout, career change, and what comes next for working professionals.

Join the Where I'm At Community, free to join: https://community.whereimatcommunity.com/store/product/membershipWebsite: https://www.whereimatcommunity.com

Where I'm At is based on lived experience, reflection, and educational support. It is not therapy, counselling, crisis support, or professional advice. Please consult a qualified professional for individual medical, psychological, legal, financial, employment, or specialist support where relevant.