Breaking The Burnout Cycle
Are you a female entrepreneur who is currently spinning your wheels, doing all the right things, yet continuing to find yourself hitting an invisible wall that is keeping you from the success, fulfillment, freedom, & happiness you want?
You’ve read the books. Taken the courses. Implemented the strategies. You know the “how to”...but somehow they either don’t work for you when you apply them OR you can’t get yourself to stay consistent with them to get them to work for you.
And because of that there is a part of you that wonders deep down
“Why is this working for everyone else but me?”
“Maybe I’m doing something wrong? What am I missing?”
“Am I not doing enough?”
…or worse - “Is something wrong with me?”
And because you’ve only learned one way to achieve success, you now find yourself believing that the only way to achieve your goals is to work even harder. To push and push and push, like nothing else matters, not your health, not your family, not your life.
Here’s the truth: You’re not broken. You’re just burnt out from doing success the way you were taught — the hustle-harder, push-through, ignore-your-needs kind of way.
Breaking the Burnout Cycle is the podcast that finally speaks to you. Hosted by Dr. Reana Mulcahy, subconscious reprogramming coach and former hustle-addict turned aligned success mentor, this show is your permission slip to stop over-functioning, start honoring your truth, and finally create the next level of success from a place of alignment, not exhaustion.
Dr. Reana over the past 4 years has been high achievers, like yourself, break free from the burnout cycle by teaching brain-based tools, rooted in neuroscience and neuropsychology, to help you identify, understand, and break free from subconscious habits that are keeping you from the success, fulfillment, and freedom you crave.
Each week, we dive into subconscious mindset work, nervous system healing, and the invisible beliefs that keep high achievers stuck in survival mode — even when they look “successful” on the outside. You'll hear solo episodes, client breakthroughs, and expert conversations designed to help you rewire your beliefs, reclaim your energy, and rise into the results, relationships, and reality you know you’re meant for.
It’s time to stop chasing success that costs you your peace. It’s time to break the burnout cycle — for good.
Subscribe now and let’s rewrite the rules of success, together.
Breaking The Burnout Cycle
Episode 60: The High Achiever's Blind Spot...Why We Can't See Our Own Wins
Why do high achievers struggle to celebrate their wins? We excel at achievement but fail at self-acknowledgment.
At the core of this challenge lies your brain's evolutionary wiring. Your neural pathways are designed to scan for problems rather than celebrate wins – a survival mechanism that once protected our ancestors but now creates a perpetual state of "never enough" for ambitious individuals. When I work with high-achieving clients, they consistently struggle with the simple task of identifying a single weekly win, not because they haven't made progress, but because their definition of success has become dangerously narrow.
Many of us received praise and validation primarily when we succeeded, creating a subconscious pattern where external achievements become the only acceptable form of success. This creates a dangerous trap: defining success from the outside in rather than from the inside out. True fulfillment comes from acknowledging who you're becoming in the journey, not just checking off accomplishments. Like a pilot making small navigational adjustments, the one-degree shifts in how you recognize progress can dramatically change your destination.
The solution begins with a simple but powerful practice: documenting one action daily that moved you forward, regardless of the outcome. This rewires your brain to value the journey as much as the destination. Ready to break this cycle?
Start celebrating your progress today, and if you need support shifting this mindset, reach out directly on Instagram @Dr.ReanaMulcahy. Your worth isn't determined by what you achieve – it's already within you.
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Discover more ways I can support you in breaking the burnout cycle. Visit my website.
If you find, as a high achiever, that you are really hard on yourself and you don't acknowledge your wins, then this episode's for you, because it's all about why this is so hard for you and why it's important to acknowledge your wins. That's all coming up on today's episode, so stay tuned, stay tuned. Hi, I'm Dr Riana Mulcahy and, after burning out not just once, but twice, I've uncovered that burnout becomes a never ending loop unless you uncover the subconscious beliefs at the root of it all. Each week, I'm bringing you brain based tools and strategies that will help you to identify and rewire subconscious blocks keeping you from the success, happiness and freedom that you really want. This is Breaking the Burnout Cycle Podcast. Okay, today's episode is for you.
Speaker 1:If you are the high achiever or the high performer who is extremely, extremely hard on yourself and by hard on yourself I'm talking like you don't acknowledge how far you have come and all of the hard work and struggles that you have persevered through, because I know for a fact that if you are a high achiever and a high performer, that this is actually a skill that is really hard for you, because it's like you start looking at all of the things that you haven't accomplished yet and you start looking at the gap of like where you are, but the epic, audacious goals that you have and how far you still have to go, and I see this time and time again. In fact, we actually just wrapped up with our third cohort of students who have gone through the Rewired to Thrive group program, and this was one of the hardest exercises ever, I kid you not, ever, in the sense of you know people come in thinking the work of uncovering subconscious, invisible beliefs is going to be the hard work, but that actually is the easy part. Where I see so many high achievers and high performers like yourselves struggle with is to acknowledge a win for the week. So at the beginning of every call, we essentially are doing a roundtable of wins. So I'm asking every student to share one win, whether it's in their business or towards a big project or goal or just personally, just sharing a win, a positive that they are very proud of and very excited about. And I kid you not, for the first six weeks of the program, every single student says I don't have one, I have nothing, I don't have any wins to share.
Speaker 1:And I want to talk about that, because why is it so hard to acknowledge how far we've come. Why is it so hard for us to be proud of? You know the way we show up the one foot forward that we put in front of the other to make progress towards our goals, and yet it's so easy for us to tear ourselves down to say how much we are not doing enough for all of the mistakes that we're making, or all of you know yada, yada, yada, basically all of the negative things that we are still working through, and I share this, because this was also something that I used to struggle with as well. And I'll tell you why it happens. The reason why we have such a hard time acknowledging our wins over the things that we're not doing and the mistakes that we are making is because our brains are just naturally wired that way. Our brains are not wired to look at the ways that positives are happening. In fact, our brain's number one job, and only job, is to essentially keep us safe. That is the number one priority for the brain. So, with that being said, we are not going to be looking at all of the positives and all of the reasons why things are going great or why we're making progress, or why we have so much to be proud of ourselves, but rather it will look at all of the problems, because guess what Problems are only problems? Because it's the brain's perception that this is something that needs to change if we are to get to where we want to go, if we are to get the level of income we want, get the love we want, etc. Etc. Right, whatever we want. Problems are the things that need to change. They are the threats, they are the things we need to address, to address.
Speaker 1:So our brains are naturally wired to scan the environment for problems, not for the positives, not for the things that are working. And you can see this all the time. Just look at what happens on the news. What are we looking at? Crime problems, all of those things. If you talk to anyone else about you know their life. What do they typically go to? All of the problems, all of the things that are going wrong. And that is just a natural propensity to do that, because that's how the brain is wired. I mean, even when we look at the phenomenon of rubbernecking, where you know someone gets in a car accident, and we immediately do what? Well, we look. We look to see what's going on. That is our brain's natural tendency to look for things in the environment that are essentially, things that we can avoid and or change.
Speaker 1:So this is one of the reasons why so many of us have a hard time celebrating wins, because for so many of us high achievers, the threat is not making progress, not doing, and so essentially, essentially, what's happening is our brains will look at all of the things that we haven't accomplished yet rather than the things that we have. And that's just a natural tendency, like we talked about, because, as high achievers, chances are that many of our validation or praise, or even just love and acknowledgement came from succeeding. And so when we're not succeeding in the way that we define succeeding by doing more, then what tends to happen is that the brain just immediately shuts it out as a win. It's like I didn't accomplish this thing and therefore it's not a win, it's not big enough, it's not doing enough, and that is why so many students come in the program and the first few weeks they are essentially like I have zero wins, I didn't accomplish, you know, acquiring a new client, or you know saying no and setting a boundary or whatever it is. And yet, all you know, if we dig deeper.
Speaker 1:All of the wins that they actually do have are the way that they showed up and they did the work. They wrote out the, the brain dumps of what was going through their minds when they're having these triggers or when they're having these things. Or they essentially took one step forward where, even though they didn't get a client, for example, they put themselves out there and they put a reel out there, or they went live or they did a webinar and it's like so you're saying you have zero wins and that is the brain's natural tendency and the danger with that is it will always create a definition of success from the outside, in, where achievements and hitting milestones and hitting goals is the only way to be successful, versus success being from the inside out, where it's like you are proud regardless of whether or not you got the result. You're proud because you took action, you had the bravery, the courage, you did the internal work and essentially that is the win. It's the who you are becoming rather than what you are achieving. And that shift. It sounds not like a huge shift, but it is so important, especially if you are to see yourself as successful and enough as is, because you are. You already are, but you aren't allowing that to happen because the brain is still focusing on achievements and the praise and the external validation that you get as the goal.
Speaker 1:And so how do you break free from this? Well, how you break free from this is, essentially, it's a practice and a discipline of the mind where, every day I'm going to challenge you to, essentially, you will sit down and write at least one thing that you did to move the needle forward. The analogy I give all the time is flying. Okay, did you know that when you are flying or not? You know, obviously I'm not a pilot, but did you know that, essentially, when pilots are flying from, let's say, you know, las Vegas to California, just for an example, las Vegas to California, just for an example, did you know that it's not a linear path? So what I mean by that is that what they actually do is they are kind of doing these one to two degree shifts off the course to kind of navigate through the winds. And you know, if you were to keep going one or two degree shifts to the right, for example, or north, for example, then you could end up in a completely different area. And the same is true with the discipline of the mind where it's.
Speaker 1:If you continue to focus on who you are becoming in the process on your way to the goals of success, and you continue to focus on these one degree shifts that you changed in the way that you approach success, then guess what Same thing goes with the analogy that I gave. It's these one degree shifts that lead to different outcomes, and that is the point that it's not about the achievements as a win, but it's about seeing how did you show up for yourself in the journey towards the success, and so I hope that you know already just how successful, how worthy, how accomplished you already are. So now it's a matter of practicing so that your mind can see it for yourself as well. And if you want help with this, then shoot me a message on Instagram at Dr Riana Mulcahy, and we'll chat there about what's getting in the way of you seeing you yourself as already successful. So I'll see you guys on another episode and until then, bye for now.