Ep 175: Breaking the Burnout Cycle: Healing Overwork & Reclaiming Rest as a Soul-Led CEO

There’s a moment we don’t talk about enough, the one where you finally have time to rest… and you still choose to push through.

In this deeply resonant solo episode, Jessica peels back the layers of emotional inheritance, sharing her own pattern of overgiving and the invisible beliefs that told her stillness was selfish.

If you’ve ever said yes when your body screamed no…
If your success feels tied to exhaustion…
If rest makes you feel guilty, lazy, or even unsafe…

This episode is for you.

This isn’t just a business mindset shift. It’s emotional liberation. Nervous system repair. And the beginning of a new paradigm, one where your business is built with your body, not against it.

Inside this episode:

• Jessica’s raw confession about rescheduling rest
• The emotional lineage that tells women “you have to earn ease”
• How survival energy hides in launch urgency and over-delivering
• Three reflection cues to gently disrupt the overwork pattern
• Why reclaiming rest is the bravest CEO move you can make

This is the episode you return to when you're burnt out but afraid to slow down. When your calendar’s full but your soul is tired. When you’re ready to stop proving, and start restoring.

Sacred Moments & Searchable Topics:

[00:01:30] Inherited patterns of overwork in soul-led women
[00:03:45] Rest as rebellion: redefining worth and work ethic
[00:05:10] Signs your business model is built on burnout
[00:06:15] Reflection cues for healing emotional overgiving
[00:08:10] Regulating your nervous system through rest, not hustle

Transcript

0:06

Welcome to Resource with Jessica Reed. This is the podcast for visionary entrepreneurs who are here to build a thriving business and luminous life, fully resourced from the inside out. Here we unlock the magic of inner alignment, emotional mastery, and energetic strategies, so you can lead with clarity, confidence, and ease. This is your space to shed what no longer serves you, embody your highest potential, and expand into the next evolution of your business and soul's work. You are meant for more, and it all starts here. I caught myself doing it again. I rescheduled rest. I had the space in my calendar. I had the reason for resting, not that I need one. I had the full body no to doing the thing, and still I moved ahead with it. I said yes to someone instead of saying, I'm sorry, this is beyond my capacity, and that is the moment that I realized. I was actually back in survival. So I have inherited, and I think this is gonna really resonate with so many of you a emotional pattern that rest is actually selfish, that overworking is noble and that stillness is unsafe. Let's unpack that today. Welcome back to Resourced. This is the podcast where soul led entrepreneurs are building sustainable success without sacrificing who they are and what they want from their life. My name is Jessica Read, and today we are talking about a pattern that most of us are living, but very few have actually named. Maybe you've named it. Very few are brave enough to break it, and that is the emotional inheritance of overwork and guilt. So you are going to hear part of my own story today. You are gonna learn how this pattern hides inside your business model and walk away with three reflection cues that you can journal on, meditate on, so that if you want to be the pattern breaker, you can shift this. So before I built this business, I was working in a job where I was celebrated for really pushing through, okay. It was supposed to be nine to five. It was more like, I dunno, seven till six. It was huge. I showed up sick. This was obviously pre COVID. We were rewarded for showing up sick. We were rewarded for not having days off, sitting in the office. Oh, just don't, I'm too close. I've got a cough. I would skip my lunch breaks. I worked on my weekends and I was rewarded for it. I was promoted. I was paid significant amounts of money. I was given more responsibility, continually praised my inner child, loved it, all the recognition. But when I started this business. And really those patterns, they weren't new for me. They just really hit me physically. At that point in time, when I started this business though, I brought all of that with me. I felt really guilty if I had to cancel a client session, even if I was bedridden, even if it meant that they were not gonna get the best of me. I overdelivered in my programs. Because I really felt like I had to earn their money. I had to earn the ability to switch off. I believed that I had to, sorry, that success, sorry, had to be earned with hard work and exhaustion. And it wasn't until I started outsourcing earlier than I believed I was ready, I allowed myself to start actually canceling sessions. If my energy was off, which I think is really important in this work, or if I was really unwell and let myself feel that discomfort of doing less, that I really started to see it. Clearly. This wasn't about work ethic for me, even though I always told myself it was this'cause I was a hard worker. But actually it was about worthiness. So most of us have inherited our relationship to work. We watched our mothers, our grandmothers, our caregivers, rest only when everything was done. And even then we might not have even seen it. We likely didn't see the rest for so many of us. They'd be praised for pushing through or criticized for slowing down the nervous system. Learned your nervous system to Slack. Mine learned that doing. Equals safety and stillness equals danger. So even when your mind says rest is productive and your body is, say your body though, your body is saying keep going, or you are going to lose love, you're gonna lose income. You're gonna lose respect. And this is showing up in your business, your launches that are built on urgency. Your client containers that dramatically overgive. Your fear of taking up space because we haven't felt safe, not working, and then you've likely built your whole business model on this. Which is why you're running yourself into the ground, which is why your clients don't feel aligned, which is why your office suite doesn't feel aligned, which is why there's no white space in your calendar. That is how I built my business foundations or why I built my Business Foundations program because I believe in building a business based on our core values, based on our nervous system health, based on the season of life that we are in. And then building our business model around that to support that. If that's something with, that's where you are at, you can get business foundations right now. I'll link it down below. There is an introductory pricing at the moment, so jump down and take advantage of that. It is completely self-paced. You can literally start rebuilding your business from the inside out straight away. But if you are resonating with this relationship. To overgiving this guilt around resting, if you know that there are patterns to break. I have three reflection cues here for you to explore. So the first one is to think about who in your lineage was only praised when they were working, who was only praised for working? Where did you learn this pattern? Where did you see it? Over and over again. This is generational. This is not just about you. This is about you breaking that pattern if you choose to. What feels emotionally at risk for you when you rest? I was so scared that if I canceled a new client or canceled any client because I was unwell, that they wouldn't come back. I was so scared of that. Then that would be reaffirming the stories that I had about myself not being good enough. What am I afraid will happen if I slow down? This is your third prompt. What am I afraid will happen if I slow down? And then what might actually happen instead? And start to get curious about that and surround yourself with people who are building their CEO calendar out with the white space. With a nervous system led business and start to sit in the discomfort. I really challenge you to do less this week. I challenge you to invite in rest. I challenge you to really sit through the discomfort of thinking, this is lazy. Let yourself breathe with these. You don't have to journal on them right now. You can. You can go deep into it. You can meditate on it later, but just let these questions ripple in you. Now you can start to, or a pattern that I've noticed is that we often then tie our worth to our wins. And a big part of that is because we have decided that if we are not doing, if we are slowing down, if we are not proving all of the time, then we are unworthy. And so if this is stirring something in you, your next step is to download my free private podcast resource. This is called The Resilient Entrepreneur. Okay? It is a quiet, potent space for realignment and disconnection of your worth to your wins, and building that emotional resilience that you need as an entrepreneur to build your business from. It's completely free. You can access it right now at jessica reed.com/private podcast. Or you can jump down to the show notes. And if you take one thing away from today, and I know this sounds like a chatt PT line, you see it everywhere. You are not broken, you're not behind, you're not lazy. But I am actually gonna say, you are not lazy. You're not lazy for needing rest. You are not selfish for protecting your energy. Okay. What you are doing is healing what was never yours to carry because you are allowed to build a business that doesn't run on over work, and you don't have to do this alone. So start in the private podcast, go and get your free, resilient, entrepreneur private podcast series, and then come back to me next week resourced. I will see you next Tuesday when the next episode drops. Thank you so much for being here and of course you are so welcome to come and have a conversation on Instagram. Let me know what landed for you today. Lemme know how uncomfortable it is for you to start breaking these generational patterns of overworking and overgiving and I will celebrate the crap out of you. I was gonna say swear word. I will celebrate you so deeply for starting this work. All right. I'll see you next week. Bye for now. Thank you for tuning into resource with Jessica Reed. If today's episode spoke to you, I'd love for you to share it with another soul led entrepreneur who is also ready to rise. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and stay connected because when you are deeply resourced, you become unstoppable. Until next time, my friend, stay resourced. Stay radiant and trust in the magic that is you.