When Hard Work Stops Working: Burnout and the Need to Prove Yourself

When does perseverance stop being a strength and start becoming self-abandonment?

For high achievers, working harder often starts as a successful survival strategy. It earns recognition, proves people wrong, and creates opportunities. But inside hustle culture and dysfunctional workplaces, that same drive can trap you in chronic overworking—constantly giving more to systems that keep taking without giving anything meaningful back.

In this solo episode of Hustle Rebels, Renae Mansfield explores how her need to prove herself began as the overweight girl fighting for a starting position on her varsity softball team—and followed her into becoming the first and only woman in her fire department.

You’ll hear why competence gets rewarded with more work, how perseverance becomes tied to identity and self-worth, and the critical difference between effort that builds you and effort that slowly erases you.

The goal isn’t to become less driven. It’s to stop spending your drive on people, workplaces, and systems that consume you without taking you anywhere.

• Want more info? → https://hustle-rebels.com
• Support the Show: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2560329/support

RESOURCES:

•  Get Week 1 of Burn the Blueprint, free: [https://wayward-wellness-coaching.kit.com/burn-the-blueprint-week-one] 
• Book a Brainspotting Session: [https://calendly.com/waywardwellnesscoaching/packages/eb0c0772-56b6-47a0-9510-cb0187ed0dec]
• Book a call with Renae: [https://calendly.com/waywardwellnesscoaching/connectwithrenae]
• Ready to go DEEPER? Burn the Blueprint 4-week Course → [https://burn-the-blueprint.my.canva.site]
• Join the Weekly Recharge newsletter, out every Wednesday: [https://wayward-wellness-coaching.kit.com]

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We love to tell ourselves that doing hard things makes us stronger. Q every millennial seeing Kelly Clarkson. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. Or even Kanye. That that that that the don't kill me can only make me stronger. And sometimes it does. But sometimes the hard things is just slowly draining the life out of you. And your refusal to quit isn't always resilience. It's conditioning. This is Hustle Rebels, the podcast for people who still want to win but are starting to question the cost. I'm Renee, your host and burnout recovery expert. I help overachievers get out from under the grind culture, stop sacrificing themselves to a system that literally never gives back, and actually live a life that they worked so hard for like they deserve. Before retirement takes their decrepit body. Both people work hard, both people stay committed, and both people keep showing up when things get uncomfortable. But internally, those are completely different experiences. One kind of effort builds you, the other slowly erases you. And if you spent most of your life being praised for how much you can tolerate, how reliable and loyal you are, or how you just always find a way to get shit done, it can be really fucking hard to know which one that you're doing. Before we get into that, if this is your first time here, welcome to Hustle Rebels. I'm Renee Mansfield, your host, a former firefighter paramedic, burnout recovery expert, and full-time recovering overachiever. This show is where we question the rules that were handed about hard work, success, loyalty, and what you're supposed to sacrifice in order to be considered worthy of any of it. If that sounds like your kind of conversation, follow and subscribe wherever you're listening, and leave a comment or review if something resonates, because that's what keeps these conversations flowing. And because I'm a nosy neighbor and I genuinely love to know what is going on in your guys' lives. Anyway, let's hop right back in. So I've been thinking about this difference between a brick wall and a building block. A building block can still be hard. It can require patience, discomfort, repetition, and a willingness to absolutely suck at something for a while. But the effort is building something that you actually want. But a brick wall is different. A brick wall is when you keep giving more of yourself to something that gives nothing meaningful back. You work harder, you tolerate more, you become flexible, more useful, and more available, and somehow the answer is still great, what else can you do? With some more imprints on your skin. There's no arrival, there's no sense of real accomplishment, maybe not even any basic appreciation. Just another expectation waiting for you the second that you finish the last one. And listen, I'm not saying that everything that you choose should be easy and constantly validating. That's not real life. Sometimes meaningful goals are tedious. Sometimes growth feels like absolute garbage while you're in it. And sometimes the thing that you deeply want requires you to do the things that we would rather launch yourself directly into the fucking sun for. But difficulty alone does not make something meaningful. And I promise you that I'm speaking from experience. Struggling is not proof that you are on the right path. And suffering longer than everyone else does not automatically make you noble, loyal, or strong. Sometimes it just means that you were trained to abandon yourself before you're okay with disappointing someone else. So when does perseverance become your identity? I know this one because I literally live it. Or lived it. I'm still going through it. But it didn't start with the fire department. Long before I was trying to prove that I belonged in the firehouse, I was the overweight girl on the varsity softball team who knew that she was capable of more than sitting on the bench. And yes, I knew exactly why I was being underestimated. I was fat. I've been fat my whole life. So when I went to my coach and I told her to put me in, just give me a chance to prove myself, she finally did. And I proved that I belonged on that field. And from that point on, I started. That experience taught me something very powerful. When people underestimate you, work harder and prove them wrong. And at that age, that lesson served me. It taught me to advocate for myself. It taught me to never let someone else decide what I was capable of based on how I looked. And it showed me that I could demand the opportunity and then back it up. But the lessons that save us in one season can quietly run the rest of our lives in another. Because proving myself worked. It got me off the bench, it earned me a starting position for that season. It gave me evidence that I could overcome other people's assumptions through sheer effort. So of course, I kept using it. Every time I felt underestimated, dismissed, or that I didn't fully feel like I belonged, the answer became the same. Work harder, handle more, give them absolutely no reason to doubt you. So by the time I entered the fire service, that pattern was not new to me. It was trained. Being the first and only female in my department simply gave me a much bigger stage on which to perform it. I wasn't going to be the one who couldn't handle it. I wasn't going to ask for special treatment. I wasn't going to give anyone a reason to question whether I belonged there. And honestly, my ability to push through was one of my best qualities. Until it wasn't. So I worked, I adapted, I tolerated, and I picked up the weight and convinced myself that carrying it without complaint was strength. Then after my emergency surgery, one of the first concerns coming from the department was about my sick time. Not whether I was okay, not whether I needed something, my sick time. And even that wasn't the first moment where I thought, wow, maybe the system doesn't give a shit about me. There had been plenty of evidence. I just kept overruling it because leaving felt more threatening to my identity than staying felt threatening to my health. That's the part we don't talk nearly enough about. Because sometimes you're not staying because the thing is still right for you. You're staying because you don't know who you are if you stop fighting for it. If you've always been the one that everyone relies on, walking away feels really weak. If you've always been loyal and a people pleaser, choosing yourself feels incredibly selfish. If you've always been the one that finishes what they start, changing your mind feels like failure. So you keep throwing your face into that same brick wall and calling the concussion character development. But at some point, you have to admit that is a very terrible strategy. You're gonna give yourself a TBI. Not gonna lie. But here's one distinction that I want you to sit with. Is this hard for you? Or is it hard on you? Something that is hard for you asks something of you, but it also gives something that matters. It might give you growth, meaning, pride, connection, freedom, strength, or movement toward a life that you consciously chose. But something that is hard on you keeps extracting your energy and health and time, your relationships, your personality, and eventually even your ability to imagine, and eventually even your ability to imagine a life outside of it. See, one stretches your capacity, but the other one exploits it. Again, they can look almost identical from the outside. That is why nobody gets to answer this for you. Not your boss or your family, your partner, or some rando on the internet who turned waking up at fucking 4 a.m. into their entire personality. No, thank you. You have to be honest about what the effort is doing inside of your life. So ask yourself, when I recover from doing this hard thing, do I feel more like myself or do I just feel relieved that it's temporarily over? Is this effort moving me towards something that I chose? Or is it just helping me maintain an identity that I'm incredibly afraid to lose? If nobody praised me for enduring this, would I still believe that it's worth the cost? And maybe the most uncomfortable one. Who actually benefits from me continuing to push this hard? Because if the honest answer is everyone except you, I would not call that ambition. I would call that a warning sign. So why do we keep waiting for such a dramatic turning point? Because the problem is that once we recognize that wall, we think that the next move has to be ginormous and dramatic. Quit the job and the relationship, move across the country and reinvent our entire life by Monday morning and somehow develop some color-coded morning routine while you're at it. I don't know. ADHD. No wonder why people stay stuck. Your whole nervous system is already overwhelmed just thinking about it. And now you're handling it like a demolition project. You don't need to know the entire way out in order to stop walking further in. Sometimes the first move is just 30 seconds. 30 seconds of acknowledging the truth. 30 seconds of researching an option that you might have been afraid to look at. 30 seconds of writing the first sentence. Or 30 seconds of sitting in your car before walking to the house and asking yourself what you actually need before automatically becoming whoever everybody needs and expects you to be when you walk in. 30 seconds of saying, let me think about that, instead of immediately answering yes. The small step matters because it's not only moving you towards something, it's rebuilding trust with yourself. And every time you make that giant promise to change your life and can't sustain it, your brain collects more evidence that you can't trust yourself. But when you choose one small action that you can actually complete, you create a different type of evidence. Something that's like, I said I would do this and I did it. It might not look impressive to everyone else. Good. They're not the ones who have to fucking build the trust with it. Who cares? But when does hard work stop working? That might be a next question, right? And this is where the hustle culture gets a little sneaky because it tells us that the answer to work that is no longer working is to do more work. Not better leadership, not clear priorities, not enough people to realistically do the job and not questioning whether the job is worth what it is costing you. The hustle culture tells you that you need to be more focused, be more disciplined, biohack, more efficient, wake up earlier, optimize your calendar, meal prep, meditate in the parking lot, get a standing desk so that you can burn yourself out vertically. Just so many more things to add to your to-do list. The entire burden gets pushed back onto the person that's already carrying too much. And us overachievers are especially vulnerable to this because working harder probably has solved more problems for you before. Let's just be honest. You've studied harder before and you got the grade. You've trained harder before and you made the team or lost the weight. You took the extra shift and paid the bills, and you stayed late and you got the promotion. So your brain learns a very simple equation. If something isn't working, give more. More effort, more time, more patience, more, more, more of yourself. But that equation only works when effort has some sort of relationship with the outcome. Inside a dysfunctional workplace or even an identity within yourself, effort often gets rewarded with more responsibility, not more authority, more support, or more freedom. You become the one that's more reliable, which is corporate language for great, now we can hand more shit to Renee. Your competence becomes the reason that nobody thinks that you need help. Or your loyalty becomes the permission to keep overlooking you for a promotion or a raise. And your ability to tolerate a ridiculous amount of pressure becomes the standard that everyone now expects you to maintain, if not overachieve. That is how strength gets turned against you. At some point, pushing harder is no longer ambition. It is a participation in your own exploitation. And I know that sentence is not going to look adorable embroidered on a pillow, but we need to tell the truth about what happens when a workplace survives by convincing its best people that exhaustion is simply the price of being exceptional. It is not. And no, recognizing that difference does not mean you have to quit your job tomorrow, launch a business by Friday, and dramatically announce your new life on Instagram. It may just start with admitting that your exhaustion is not a discipline problem, or that you're no longer volunteering to rescue every preventable emergency. You may just have one honest conversation or start with an application or a decision that belongs to you instead of the system. The point is not to stop being driven. The point is to stop spending that drive on things that keep consuming you without taking you anywhere. So I want to pull everything together because not every hard thing is worth pushing through. Effort that builds you can still be uncomfortable, slow, frustrating, and messy, but it moves you towards something you actually chose. And there's some relationship between what you give and what actually comes back. Effort that erases you keeps demanding more while returning less. And often survives because your identity is attached to being the one who just never quits. And when a dysfunctional system repeatedly rewards competence with more work, working harder eventually stops being the solution. It becomes the fuel keeping the dysfunction alive. Now you don't have to blow up your entire career the second you recognize the difference. Just start with one small action that you can keep. Let that become the proof that you can trust yourself again. So this all came up in my conversation with Robin Godfrey, which drops next week. Robin was burned out in a corporate sales career when at 47, she stepped onto a hotel treadmill and asked herself whether she could just run for 30 seconds. Not a marathon, not even a mile, 30 seconds. That tiny decision eventually led her to complete all six world marathon majors. But what I loved about our conversation wasn't simply the giant accomplishment at the end. It was the difference that she described between pushing toward a goal that belonged to her and repeatedly hitting brick walls inside a company where she just no longer felt valued. We get into things like motivation, identity, caregiving through her husband's stage four cancer diagnosis, the people that you need in your corner, and what it really looks like to keep moving when the full picture is just too overwhelming to hold. So make sure you're following Hustle Rebels because that conversation drops next Thursday. And as always, the first week of Burn the Blueprint Identity Reset is free for you guys. So if this episode made you question whether you're building your life or disappearing inside of it, that is exactly the kind of thing that we pull apart inside of the identity reset. You can find it through the link in the show notes below. And don't forget to like and subscribe, leave a comment or a review, and tell me, what is the one thing in your life that you're finally realizing might be a brick wall instead of a building block? And if you know somebody who keeps calling self abandonment being strong, send this episode to them. Lovingly, of course. We are revels, not assholes. Although sometimes we could be a loving asshole. New episodes and conversations drop every Thursday, so see you guys in the next one.