Is Balance Costing You Everything? | Dear Leila

0:00 – 6:45

When burnout is not a bad week, but a bad fit for who you have become

The episode opens with a tension a lot of ambitious people secretly carry: what if the thing you worked hardest to build is now the thing crushing you? Janette, a head of marketing in Germany, says she has spent years climbing, taking on more responsibility, and never saying stop. Now she is burned out and asking the unnerving question, am I climbing the wrong ladder, or just reacting to a rough chapter? Leila immediately makes the distinction that drives the rest of the conversation. The question is not simply whether work feels uncomfortable. The real question is whether the role is uncomfortable because of a temporary circumstance, or because it has become a bad fit. That lands hard when Janette admits something unusually honest: maybe it is not just the circumstances, maybe it is me. She has trained everyone around her to expect endless output. Leila recognizes the pattern right away. There are people who will burn themselves out no matter what, because at one point in life ambition, capacity, and identity were all lined up. The problem comes later, when your life changes but everyone around you still relates to the older version of you. That leads to Leila's unexpected point. Growth here is not pushing harder. Growth is becoming wise enough to reset the relationship with work. In theory, Janette could tell her boss she needs a healthier workload. In practice, Leila says many bosses are not incentivized to support that. If someone has been doing the work of multiple people for years, reducing their load often means the company has to feel the pain it was previously outsourcing onto that employee. That is why resentment often builds and why staying can become harder than leaving. The most memorable turn comes when Janette frames leaving as failure, and Leila rejects that completely. Leaving an unsustainable role is not proof of weakness. It may be the more courageous move because staying is usually easier, even when you are miserable. Leila reframes Janette's pivot not as quitting, but as moving from proving value through self-destruction to protecting value through judgment. The section closes with Janette deciding to do it, and Leila cheering her on. The bigger lesson is that balance does not mean keeping every commitment alive forever. Sometimes it means ending one chapter because the person who started it is no longer the person living it.