Even a life-first business can’t fix the burnout if you’re still carrying the full emotional and domestic load. Here’s what I’m learning—and unlearning.
It just hit me: we’re coming up on a year since everything cracked open. This time last year, my body sent out a full-blown distress signal.
In the space of one week, my husband’s last living parent passed away (18 months after the other), we were asked to vacate our apartment while we were meant to be traveling, and I’d just come off a stretch of solo parenting during school break while dealing with debilitating pain. There was more—but you get the picture.
It all caught up with me. Physically, emotionally, spiritually. I found myself in and out of doctors’ offices, scared by the intensity of the symptoms. But looking back now, I see it for what it was: a collapse I didn’t choose, but maybe desperately needed.
I thought I had already “fixed” the things causing my stress. I’d restructured my business to be life-first. Everything was streamlined, simplified and I had the kind of spaciousness I didn’t realize was possible with my old business model. But in focusing so much of my attention, I hadn’t fully accounted for everything I was still carrying at home.
It seems like the most obvious solution for burn out, doesn’t it? Shift your business to create more freedom. Work fewer hours. Be more present.
You can do the 2:10PM school pickup. Shuttle your kids to their activities. Get dinner started before the meltdowns begin.
And yes—this is one of the greatest privileges we have as entrepreneurs with life-first businesses.
But what I’ve learned—and am still learning—is that creating more spaciousness in business doesn’t magically reduce the pressure at home.
And it’s not as simple as just hiring a cleaner or delegating a few household tasks, as social media posts or surface-level courses would have you believe. The pressure I was feeling – and what so many of my students navigate – was deeper than logistics. It was internal. Emotional. Patterned. And generational.
Because when we downshift work—even on purpose, even with intention—the domestic and emotional labor doesn’t downshift with it.
The mental load actually grows.
The caregiving responsibilities grow.
The expectation that you’ll do more at home now that you “have the time” becomes implicit.
And slowly, the boundaries blur.
You’re in full-blown CEO mode during “school hours,” and then doing everything else at home in the hours in-between—organizing schedules, planning meals, buying birthday gifts, managing everyone’s feelings—while still trying to show up as the best version of yourself in every room.
And here’s the tension:
You want to.
I wanted to build my business.
And I also want to be hands-on and present in all of the other parts of my life.
But the question I was forced to sit down and reflect on is: where are you in all of this?
Nobody has ever told me to take on so much. I’ve done all of it out of my own volition.
But here’s what I’ve come to understand now—in my mid-thirties, with the clarity that comes from sheer emotional burnout:
Just because I “chose” it doesn’t mean it isn’t costing me.
And there’s a difference between choosing and defaulting to what you’ve seen modeled and subsequently internalized.
Because being all the things to all people in every space… there’s a toll. And last year I really experienced the cost of it.
That’s the fallacy of part=time work of flexible entrepreneurship that doesn’t get spoken about.
We work part-time hours, but take on full-time responsibility everywhere.
And because many of us intentionally chose this life—because we wanted more presence, more connection, more agency—we feel guilty for finding it exhausting. Or at least, I did.
I realized that, as someone who’s spent my whole life being the one who holds everything together… scaling back on work alone wasn’t enough.
The tendency to over-function followed me into every part of my life.
Maybe you can relate:
You over-function in business.
You over-function with your clients.
You over-function at home.
You over-function in your friendships.
You give, and you give, and you give… and you’re the last one on the list.
And here’s the hard pill I had to swallow: I was the common denominator in all of it.
Every one of those scenarios was reflecting something I was holding internally.
The belief that my value came from what I could give. That my needs can wait. That my worth is measured by how much I can carry.
I had to shift that inside in order for anything to shift outside.
You’ve probably heard me say this before: it always starts with us.
The first step is awareness.
The second is integration.
And real embodiment? That’s when your actual relationships and circumstances begin to reflect what you now know.
Recently, one of my Life First Business students brought something like this into Office Hours. She apologized at first, saying it “wasn’t technically business-related.” But of course it was.
Because this is the work.
This is why, in my coaching spaces, I always say I don’t just coach on the offer or even on the business itself—I coach the human behind it.
Because it’s all connected. It’s nuanced. Dynamic. And the more we get support around our humanity, the more things shift in a meaningful way.
So on any given day inside our coaching spaces, we’re talking about it all. Our conversations truly run the gamut.
We’re exploring what’s deeply triggering us, what’s showing up in our businesses, where we’re still sabotaging even though we “know better,” and unpacking the real reasons behind the exhaustion, overworking and burn out.
And we’re coming up with real, tangible changes that shift things at the root. Because we’re not just working at the surface level.
That’s the deeper layer of support I wish more of us had. And it’s why I’m so committed to holding space for it.
A love note from a student after the 2-day mini mind experience this month
Today, I find myself in the in-between. Not who I was. Not yet who I’m becoming.
I’m quite literally re-coding the entire ecosystem—how I relate to work, relationships and mothering in real-time.
So no, I don’t have a 5-step plan for this. But I know that sometimes it’s not about hearing from someone who’s on the other side. Sometimes what we need most is someone naming what we haven’t yet been able to name for ourselves.
If this helped put words to something you’ve felt—something you’ve maybe struggled to understand—I hope you let that land.
Not as a fix.
But as an opening.
