You Are Not A Frog

Have you ever felt ashamed or frustrated that you didn't know the answer? Not to a clinical question, but about your own life - what's next, what's wrong, why you feel the way you do?

If you're the one everyone relies on, not knowing can feel like failing at the one thing you're supposed to be good at. This is a replay from 2024 I'm bringing back while I’m writing my book ‘How to Say No When Someone Might Die’. One of the things I keep coming back to in the book is how much of the load we carry isn't about the work at all. It's our ingrained programming that tells us we have to have the answer to feel good enough. And when we don't, it will affect your next decision, and the one after that.

In this episode we revisit what to do when the furniture is shifting, and why wait and see can be a strategy.

We cover:

• Why high achievers feel shame when they don't know what's next
• Shifting furniture - what to do when life is reconfiguring and you can't see where things will land
• Your left brain interpreter - and why it makes up catastrophic stories to feel safe
• Zone of Power - what is actually yours to carry, and what isn't
• Why wait and see is a valid, proactive strategy, not avoidance
• The next best action when you feel discombobulated

This episode is for you if... you are a doctor or professional, a high achiever in a leadership role who has to have the difficult conversation nobody else will, has to make the call someone disagrees with, and lies awake replaying a decision you had to make. If not knowing feels like not being good enough, this one is for you.

You are not a frog.

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🟦 Beat Stress & Thrive | Live Cohort Starts 13 October

You may think you're fine. You're still performing well at work, still the one people rely on, yet you know something's off.

In this episode - a replay of one of my most important conversations from 2025, I share the question that changed how I think about burnout: What are you borrowing from your life to keep your work looking fine? For many of us, our ingrained programming tells us we have to please everyone all the time to feel good enough, so we protect our work and borrow energy from the rest of our life to do it. We look totally fine on the outside. Inside, the walls are standing but there's nothing left.

I’m chatting with Dr Richard Duggins NHS Psychiatrist and Author of ‘Burnout Free Working’ about why high achievers stay high-performing right up util they burn out, what radiators and drains have to do with it, and what Richard calls the burnout cliff - where one small trigger takes you by surprise. If you go back into the same way of working, carrying the same load in the same way, it will affect your next decision, and the one after that.

This is about burnout not as a personal failing, but as a change in the balance of your energy.

We cover:

• Why your performance can stay high while the rest of your life shrinks
• Borrowing energy from home, fun, and rest to protect work
• Radiators and drains - work intensity, home pressures and culture
• The burnout cliff and the plateau before it
• Early signs - poor sleep, irritability, detachment, loss of joy
• What may help you carry it differently without going back over the edge

This episode is for you if... you are a high achiever in a leadership role who has to have the conversation nobody else will, has to make the call someone disagrees with, and lies awake replaying a decision you had to make. A doctor or professional who looks capable to everyone else but feels depleted when you get home.

You do not need to collapse to prove you were struggling.

Get weekly tools and episode notes by email: https://youarenotafrog.com/welcome

More resources: https://youarenotafrog.com/

Burnout Self-Assessment Toolkit: https://youarenotafrog.com/toolkit/

Mentioned in this episode:

🟦 Beat Stress & Thrive | Live Cohort Starts 13 October

The Overwhelm SOS Toolkit

You tell yourself that never letting anyone down is how you protect the people you love. But our ingrained programming tells us we have to please everyone all the time to feel good enough - and the people you love are the people who suffer most when you're stuck in the Responsibility Trap. They get the tired, thin version of you. If you lie awake worried you've upset someone, or feel guilty for saying no to something small like a dinner you can't make until November, this 20-minute Quick Dip will show you why that guilt isn't telling the truth, and what changes when you let the load go back to whose it actually was.

We cover:

• The November dinner — and why answering honestly can feel like a failing
• Why for us a request arrives as an obligation with our name on it
• What over 600 professionals told us about lying awake worried they've upset someone
• The identity underneath it: I'm not the sort of person who lets people down
• What that identity costs at home and at work
• The village cricket team — guilt for saying no to a sport I don't even like
• The question that proves you already let people down every day — and the world kept turning
• If I'm not the woman who never lets anyone down, then who am I? And who says?
• What happens at home and at work when you stop carrying it all — including the reception team who stopped asking her first
• Two futures — and phrases to reach for when the guilt fires

This episode is for you if... you are a high achiever in a leadership role who has to have the conversation nobody else will, has to make the call someone disagrees with, and lies awake replaying a decision you had to make. You are the one who copes, steps up, notices what needs doing — and you feel guilty even doing the work that matters most.

📩 Join 20,000 professionals: https://youarenotafrog.com/welcome/

🐸 Get exclusive episodes and resources by joining FrogXtra: https://youarenotafrog.com/members

Mentioned in this episode:

⭐️ Book Your FrogFest Ticket Now

Do you lie awake replaying a decision you had to make? That work anxiety loop where you can't stop thinking about work even when you are home? Maybe you've told yourself burnout is just the occupational hazard of this job.

You've tried to put things in place — to leave on time, to say no more often — and you just can't seem to hold them. What if you are solving the wrong problem? It's not a work stress problem, but an identity one.

Our ingrained programming tells us we have to tie who we are to how we perform to feel good enough, so when work dips, we dip. That pattern will affect your next decision, and the one after that.

In this conversation we put clean language on what keeps you fused to work, and what real burnout recovery has to start with instead. I spoke to Nick Petrie, author of Burn Bright, about why the usual advice has not touched it for you, and what may help you carry it differently.

We cover:

• Why burnout can feel like an occupational hazard — and why you may be solving the wrong problem
• What happens when you fuse your identity with work — you don't have a job, you are the job
• What he calls the Karman Line — the deliberate slow down between work and home that stops you crash landing
• Uncontrolled re-entry — why you walk through your own front door still in work mode
• Rumination vs reflection — why a patient or client complaint stays with you when you are emotionally fused to it
• Perform mode vs grow mode — why staying too long in perform mode leaves you exhausted. And bored.
• How to get more comfortable disappointing people you care about — and why that matters for recovery

This episode is for you if...

You are a doctor, senior healthcare professional or high achiever in a leadership role - someone who has to have the conversation nobody else will, who has to make the call someone will disagree with, who lies awake replaying a decision you had to make.

If you have ever thought, what is wrong with me, why can I not cope, maybe I am not good enough — this episode is for you.

Nick Petrie is a leadership coach, Burnout Researcher and author of Burn Bright. In this interview he shares practical ideas from working with high performers on identity, boundaries, and getting out of perform mode.

Listen to You Are Not a Frog wherever you get your podcasts. For workshop and event details, see the links on the channel page.

Get more episodes and resources by joining FrogXtra

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🐸 Enquire Now About Our Training

🟦 [FREE WEBINAR] How to Beat Burnout and Escape Burnout on Repeat

Note: This is a re-release of one of our most-listened to episodes — originally recorded Autumn 2025. We've given it a new edit because it's more relevant than ever.

If you know you need to do something about how you're feeling — but you keep telling yourself "not yet" — this is for you. We are very good at spotting danger in other people. Sepsis, red flags, a patient or client deteriorating. We act fast. With ourselves, we don't. We wait until it becomes catastrophic — a patient or client complaint, an error because our brain isn't working properly, our health going — before we give ourselves permission to act. This episode is about why doing nothing feels safer, why it isn't, and how to make the next step small enough you can actually take it. Not handing in your notice. One doable thing.

Download the free Burnout Self-Assessment Toolkit — work through it as you listen: https://youarenotafrog.com/toolkit/

We cover:

• Why we spot burnout and overwhelm in everyone else but not in ourselves

• The three psychological traps that keep high achievers stuck: status quo bias, loss aversion, and sunk cost — including the thought "I've given 10 or 20 years to this, I can't stop now"

• Why our ingrained programming tells us the misery we know is safer than the uncertainty we don't — and how that will affect your next decision, and the one after that

• Why waiting has a cost too — your health, your relationships, your character — and why that cost keeps going up and can be devastating

• How to decide your line before burnout decides it for you — your "kill criteria" — so you don't wait for catastrophe

• How to make the next step small enough you can actually take it: one conversation you've been avoiding, one boundary, one phone call to a trusted person — shame shrinks when you speak it

This episode is for you if you are a high achiever in a leadership role who has to have the conversation nobody else will, has to make the call someone disagrees with, or lies awake replaying a decision you had to make — and you can feel the heat building, but you keep telling yourself to keep going.

Hosted by Rachel Morris | You Are Not a Frog - for high achievers who want to care deeply and carry less.

Get weekly tools and episode notes by email: https://youarenotafrog.com/welcome

More resources: https://youarenotafrog.com/

Burnout Self-Assessment Toolkit: https://youarenotafrog.com/toolkit/

#burnout #burnoutrecovery #highachievers

Mentioned in this episode:

🟦 [FREE WEBINAR] How to Beat Burnout and Escape Burnout on Repeat

Every high-achieving leader has a to-do list that doesn't end — it just refills. And the only response most of us were ever handed for that is push harder. Grip tighter. Muscle through. In this episode, Rachel talks to Ellen Coomber, co-founder of the Softness Revolution, about why that instinct — the one we were trained into from exams onward — stops working, and what she does instead. Ellen has a genetics degree from Cambridge; she is not someone who arrived at this by avoiding rigour. She arrived at it because pushing harder had genuinely stopped working, and she had to find something else. This conversation is about that something else: working with less effort, not more, and learning to tell the difference between an instinct worth trusting and fear wearing an instinct's clothes. Getting that distinction wrong is how we end up saying yes to the thing that breaks us, and it will affect the next decision too, and the one after that.

We cover:

• Why "work harder" is the only tool most high achievers were ever handed for pressure — and where that training actually started
• The Softness Revolution: what "soft" means when it isn't the opposite of capable
• What solo-sailing a 40-foot boat taught Ellen about the difference between soft and weak
• What horses know about force that most leadership training never mentions
• How to tell your actual instinct apart from fear when they feel identical
• Why more effort is not always the effective option, and what to do with the effort you're not using

This episode is for you if...

...you're looking at a to-do list that never actually shrinks, and your automatic response is to push harder, focus more, try again — even though that's the exact same plan you had last week, and the week before. If some part of you already suspects that working harder isn't the answer but you don't yet have a working alternative, or a language for it, this one's for you.

📩 Join 20,000 professionals: https://youarenotafrog.com/welcome/

🐸 Get exclusive episodes and resources by joining FrogXtra: https://youarenotafrog.com/members

🐸 Learn more about Ellen: https://thepowerofsoftness.com

Mentioned in this episode:

🟦 Permission to Thrive

⭐️ Book Your FrogFest Ticket Now

Nearly one in three people who take time off for burnout are off again within a year - and over half of them work in healthcare. This episode is about why that keeps happening, and it isn't because anyone's weak.

You go back to the same poisoned water, you carry the same responsibility you carried before, and now there's something extra on top of it - a shame tax, the pressure to prove you're fine, to prove the time off wasn't a mark against you. Rachel walks through the Bent Tent Pole - why the same load bends you faster the second time round - and makes the case that the fix was never more resilience. It's changing what you believe is actually yours to carry.

We cover:

• Why nearly 3 in 10 people relapse into burnout within a year of returning
• The poisoned water analogy - why rest alone can't fix a toxic system
• Why dropping hours or changing roles often doesn't touch the real problem
• The Responsibility Trap: picking up what everyone else drops
• The Bent Tent Pole - why the same weight bends you faster the second time
• The Shame Tax: the extra load you carry just for having needed the break
• Why waiting for the system to fix itself keeps you stuck
• The Performance Zone - what boundaries actually look like in practice

This episode is for you if...

You're a high achiever in a leadership role who's been back at work for a while now and can feel it building again - the same tightness, the same countdown to the next break. You're the one who has to pick up what someone else dropped, who has to say yes because no one else has the whole picture, who lies awake replaying whether you're actually cut out for this. Hard as that is to admit, it's not a character flaw. It's physics, and there's a different way to carry it.

The tent pole bent because of the load, not because you were weak. You can do the work without being responsible for all of it.

📩 Join 20,000 professionals: https://youarenotafrog.com/welcome/

🐸 Get exclusive episodes and resources by joining FrogXtra: https://youarenotafrog.com/members

Mentioned in this episode:

⭐️ Book Your FrogFest Ticket Now

There's a project you've been meaning to start, a conversation you've been meaning to have, or a change you've been meaning to make. You know that you can do it, but what you can't quite find is the moment, the time, or the right conditions…and so it waits.

Robbie Swale is a coach and author who has spent years thinking about why capable, intelligent, hard-working people don't start the things they most want to do, and what it takes to change that. In this conversation, we explore the idea that the problem isn't time; it never really was.

We cover:

• The 12 Minute Method: how Robbie wrote 80,000 words in three years by dedicating twelve minutes a week, and why that's not as absurd as it sounds
• Why time management is largely choice management, and what that means for the things you keep deprioritising
• Why the internet makes it harder to start, and how to stop comparing your beginning to someone else's middle
• How to protect a new idea before it's ready to be criticised
• How to approach a big change without betting everything on it going right the first time

This episode is for you if you are the person who does the hard things, who shows up and delivers, but who also has that specific project or version of your life that keeps moving slightly out of reach. This episode may give you a slightly different question about what's actually in your way.

📩 Join 20,000 professionals: https://youarenotafrog.com/welcome/

🐸 Get exclusive episodes and resources by joining FrogXtra: https://youarenotafrog.com/members

Mentioned in this episode:

⭐️ Book Your FrogFest Ticket Now

Am I Stressed, Overwhelmed... or Burning Out?

Most of us were taught that having limits is a weakness - something to push through, not something to honour. And if you're a doctor, a nurse, a vet, or anyone in a high-stakes role, that message arrived early and arrived hard. The result is a profession full of people operating at full stretch capacity without realising it, because full stretch became the new normal so gradually that we stopped noticing.

In this conversation with Sarah Coope - former GP, CEO of Wild Monday, and executive coach - we explore what happens when we stop thinking about limits altogether, and start thinking about capacity instead.

We cover:

• Why the word "limits" triggers guilt, and what happens when you replace it with "capacity"
• The TEAM model: Time, Energy, Attention, and Money - the four dimensions of our capacity, and why overstretching one always costs you somewhere else
• The elastic band analogy: what it looks like when one corner of your square gets pulled too far, and what it takes to come back
• Why operating at the edge of burnout can blunt your awareness of how stretched you really are
• Micro-recovery and third spaces: small, practical ways to build recovery into a day that leaves no room for it
• "Guilt with an i" - why the discomfort of saying no isn't a sign you're doing something wrong. It may be a sign you're doing something right for the first time
• How to communicate your capacity to colleagues and managers without apologising for being human

This episode is for you if you know intellectually that you can't keep running this hard, but the alternative feels selfish, or like letting people down, or just not who you are. It may help you understand why what you call a "limit" is actually something worth knowing about yourself, and why caring for your own capacity is not the opposite of caring for your patients or clients - it may be the condition for it.

📩 Join 20,000 professionals: https://youarenotafrog.com/welcome/

🐸 Get exclusive episodes and resources by joining FrogXtra: https://youarenotafrog.com/members

About Sarah Coope:

Sarah Coope is a former GP, medical educator, and executive coach who works with healthcare professionals and high achievers on burnout, resilience, and sustainable performance. Her own experience of burnout is what drives her work - she coaches from the inside, not from above

Mentioned in this episode:

Am I Stressed, Overwhelmed... or Burning Out?

⭐️ Book Your FrogFest Ticket Now

Most of us have been told that burnout is caused by overwork and that the solution is to rest, take a break or slow down. Set some boundaries. But what if that's only part of the picture? What if the very thing that made you good at your job - your values, your drive, your commitment to never letting anyone down - is exactly what keeps burning you out? And what if rest, on its own, isn't enough to get you out?

In this conversation with Nick Petrie, author, leadership researcher and burnout specialist, we go deeper than the usual burnout conversation. Nick has interviewed hundreds of leaders across high-stakes professions, and his findings challenge almost everything we think we know about why burnout happens and what recovery actually requires.

We cover:

• Why high values alignment is a burnout risk, not a protection - and why caring deeply about your work can mean you have no brake
• The "outdated success formula" - the beliefs and behaviours that got you here, and why they stop working as the stakes get higher
• The burnout curve: first, second, and third degree - and how to recognise which stage you're at before your body decides for you
• The 1-1-1 mechanism: a simple, pre-scheduled way to build recovery into a life that otherwise never stops
• What post-burnout growth actually looks like, and why the version of you on the other side of burnout can be more sustainable than the one before it

This episode is for you if the drive that makes you good at what you do is also the thing that makes it impossible to stop. This episode may help you understand why our ingrained programming - the one that says delivering, caring, and never letting people down is what makes us safe - is something we can actually look at and decide whether to keep.

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Mentioned in this episode:

Am I Stressed, Overwhelmed... or Burning Out?

⭐️ Book Your FrogFest Ticket Now