Ch. 1
I’m Fine

Ch. 1

I’m Fine

Seems like lots of stories lately start with someone telling you about their big, life-changing
keynote speech. So nervous before walking on stage.
Clawing their way back from the gutter.

I was never on TEDx.
I was on stage with Jerry Springer.

If you came for the flashy resume or a ‘here’s how I made it’ story, that ain't it. And this ain’t that.
I actually don’t even have an “I made it” story.
Because I haven’t, yet.

No podcast heroes.
No celebrity therapists.
I’m not from the gutter, or blogs, or YouTube.

I’m burned out on that sales pitch. I think most people looking for something real are too.

I wasn’t in a red circle talking about my journey.
I was dancing badly in front of a live studio audience.

I’m not a dancer. I’m not even a writer, but I did win honorable mention in a poetry contest freshman year of high school.

Basically, I’m a regular person who became a contestant in the gameshow of my own life.
My job, family, and social lives all felt like competitions.

I had to prove myself in every game I played.
I had to perform.
I had to win.

We played Monopoly when I was a kid.
Raise the rent.
Bankrupt your little sister.


That’s how we did family bonding.

But I was starting to realize something.
It didn’t feel like winning anymore.
Playing life like that—it felt like burnout.

It took me a while to realize this.

Real: something not imagined or supposed. From the Latin word “res,” which means “thing” or “matter.”

"Ize” as a suffix, turns “real” into a verb. “-ize” is how we activate a concept to change or become something more.

It’s our activator.
The same way we modernize a bathroom for touchless faucets, or intellectualize a defining concept in a book’s opening chapter. If you say you realize something, it means you just learned something you didn’t know before. It might even be a subtle confession: "I was wrong about this until now."

Learning something new can cause a rush of dopamine. An addiction, one could argue, worth developing. Other benefits to realizations include synaptic plasticity and improved muscle memory. Most importantly: to realize is a good thing. We should do it often.

I just realized this: “Hang up the phone” comes from when phones actually hung on the wall.

I’ve been “hung up” on thousands of times. With the amount of people I’ve called, I probably called someone you know.

That was my professional life: sales calls.

Starting out, I cold-called from a garage. I was trying to sell long-distance cell plans to international numbers for a mom-and-pop provider. No one had heard of mom or pop, and most hung up before they heard five words of my pitch.

Then, out of a high-rise in downtown L.A., I called startup managers. I knew nothing about tech and could barely code in the four-digit sequence on the office bathroom door’s keypad. They were programming robotic eyes and rocket launches. No surprise, they hung up.

Most recently, and during the first writings of this book, I’d risen to the top ranks in tech sales at a Fortune 100 company. I wouldn’t let myself fail again. I was interrupting people’s days, pitching my heart and soul out. Day in, day out. Call after call, 70,000 of them. Most of the time, prospects said no.
More hang ups.

But some of them gave me a chance. After 70,000 calls, I started to figure a few things out. Out of all those calls: 1,543 serious pitches turned into 1,000 yeses. A hall-of-fame closing rate. In most any area of life, 69,000 failures is incomprehensible. In sales, it makes you a legend.

76,289 combined rejections and failures made me worthy of a Senior Director title in physical and emotional burnout. I tied my identity to this counterintuitive success, and people hanging up became a part of me. 

There is a fear that surges before making every call. I had become numb to that natural survival instinct. But some fears are healthy. And I was losing my ability to know when I was in danger.

I called strangers in the middle of the day to sell them something they didn’t want. Rejection on repeat. I learned to start my calls with “don’t hate me” instead of “hello”. These weren’t just cold calls. They were the frontlines of psychological sales warfare.

‘All warfare is based on deception.’ — Sun Tzu

About calling strangers, LinkedIn reports 63% of sales reps don’t buy it. They say, ‘It’s the worst part of the job.’ The other 37% are pitching a prayer or numb. To keep dialing, I had to stop feeling anything.
To survive, I had to lie to myself.

But I was brutally honest with customers.
That’s why it worked.
Until it didn’t.

I had record-breaking success, but breaking the rules of warfare blew it all up. A new policy came down essentially saying too much honesty wasn’t good.
I went from coaching teams and rewriting training scripts to corporate enemy number one. I tried to adapt, trading my personality for the mandated deceptive language. But their way to win celebrated confusion over clarity. And that couldn’t work with my reality anymore.

My 40th birthday was closing in. Thoughts plagued:

You’re not young enough to be this numb.
You’ve been around long enough to know the difference between right and wrong.

Mid-life crisis? Mid-burnout?

I confided in a friend,
Me: I’m a perfectionist. I can fix this.
Them: Really? What have you perfected lately?

…ouch.

I started putting all of my imperfections down.
Before I realized it, I was writing my way out.

High Achievers Have a High Tolerance for Pain

If we burned out at the first sign of difficulty, we wouldn’t be here. Our type is not the stub-your-toe-and-sit-on-the-sideline type. We’re the take-a-bullet, lose-a-limb, put-on-a-happy-face type. Imagine taking a break just because a couple things started stacking up on your calendar.

That’s not who we are. That’s not why we’re here. 

We’ve developed an Olympic-level tolerance for chaos. We’re the ones helping Aunt Stacy alphabetize Grandma’s gun collection mid-conference call. Winchesters and client questions. I wasn’t sure anymore which ones were loaded. High achievement inside the blast radius.

Monday nights? Non-negotiable therapy.
Tuesday? Dentist @11:30am… forgot to cancel again.
Random Thursday? Brandon’s in town.
Every other Wednesday? Board meeting.
Next Saturday? Conference in LA.
Second Friday? Volunteering.
This Sunday? Father’s Day pickleball tournament.

Add your 9-to-5 or the side hustle you’ve been building on lunchbreaks, and the kitchen becomes your worst enemy. Factor in the eating, moving, and sleeping we’re supposed to be doing and we’re pickled.

Emotional project management. I’ve scheduled personal meltdowns around other people’s availability. When we burn out, we don’t rest. We strategically collapse. We’ve made a career out of over-delivering and under-processing.

Performance-based self-abandonment.
We had to raincheck drinks with Brandon.

Told career self-sacrifice is noble. Every time someone thanks us for holding it together, it reinforces the lie that this is who we're meant to be.

It’s not.
It’s who we had to be.
Suppression becomes a skill. Rewarded for staying composed, we begin to believe composure = value.

High tolerance for emotional suffering means absence of crisis feels like rest. Burnout isn’t always quitting in a huff, or torching your career with a scathing email to the CEO cc'ing the whole company. Sometimes it’s simply saying “I’m fine” when you’re really on fire.

I used to work for a guy that went in and out of about 30 different offices a day. He was a vendor for lawyers, banks, hospitals, and all kinds of businesses. We hauled deliveries on and off of trucks all around town. The whole business ran out of that truck. HR, payroll, and customer service, all handled between stops.

One afternoon, a call came from our biggest account. They called to cancel service for a more “sustainable offer,” code for them taking a lowball competitor bid. It hurt. That one client accounted for 40% of the company. I remember sitting there in the cab of the truck in disbelief. We wanted to give up and go home, but we muscled through. I’ll never forget walking into the next account like nothing had happened.

At the bank, we step behind the teller line:
Hey Ray, how’s it goin’?

Before Leanne could even finish the word “goin’,” Ray’s reflex fires:
Good, how are youuu??

Sincere and automatic.
His tone flips interest back to her.

That was business. Get over it. Move on. And he did it with hundreds of people, every week, every month, for decades. No matter what was going on behind the scenes for him. Why? Because business is about problem solving, not talking about your own.

Grit made him great. But grit grinds under pressure.
Until it all falls apart.

One day, it did.

Ray slipped on a narrow staircase between accounts and broke his neck.

The man who never stopped was finally forced to.

All that sacrifice, all that service. His body couldn't sustain what his will kept demanding.

Emergency surgery saved him, and months of recovery followed.
I helped keep the business running and trained new employees to service accounts. He’d always said, “We just keep going.”

Now he had to learn what it meant to stop.

Burnout doesn’t always send a warning. Sometimes it sends an ambulance.

But he survived it all. He’s back on his feet. Since then, he’s found what he feels is a better way. He sees real business as solving problems together, not pretending you don't have any.

Throughout this book, you’ll have the opportunity to do the same. You'll find pages with low-effort, high-impact reflection prompts to help you solve real problems in your own life.

◆Workbook Page 1: How are Youuu??

Take a breath. Then take an honest shot.

Check the option that most closely matches what you’ve been telling people lately:

☐ “I’m fine.”  

☐ “Hanging in there.”  

☐ “Busy, but good!”  

☐ “Honestly? Not great.”  

☐ “I don’t even know anymore.”  

◆Your FNE Score: (False Narrative Evaluation)

Let’s translate your answer into burnout terms.  
The lower your score, the closer you are to the truth.

- “I’m fine.” → +10 (Lie detected.)

- “Hanging in there.” → +8 (The polite cry for help.)

- “Busy, but good!” → +7 (Classic high-functioning code.)

- “Honestly? Not great.” → +4 (Points for courage.)

- “I don’t even know anymore.” → +2 (Welcome home.)

- “Other” → +5 (Depends what you wrote.)

◆Bonus Round:  
If you’ve been on auto-reply saying “Good, and you?” add +1.
If you hesitated before answering that, add another +1 to your score.

◆Add it up:
That’s your False Narrative Evaluation.

I was running on false narrative fuel.

I got both bonus points, true overachiever move. My go-to was, “Fine, how are youuu??”

People say, “Nobody actually cares how you are when they ask ‘how are you?’ It’s just being polite.” In burnout we go through the motions instead of feeling our emotions.

Too exhausted to feel, too painful to process. 

Burnout Your Burnout isn't a slogan.
It's flipping the pressure back on itself, turning the pain around before it turns on us. 

Exhaustion finally outweighs complacency.
That’s when we enter Phase 1.

Phase 1: Inflammation

Everything hurts, and you can’t pretend anymore. You say to yourself, “Actually, I’m not fine.” This is when the truth starts turning up.

It feels like indecision. Even with little things we struggle. Shopping for avocados, squeezing them all, trying to find the perfect one. Ten minutes later, you decide, but you still pick wrong. Our minds aren’t ripe either. You’re not off track. You’re just deep in it.

I’ve stood puzzled in the produce section too many times, wondering what I went to the store for in the first place. I’d been too busy to make a list. By the time I got home, I’d finally remember. Clarity comes, but never when I need it.

These breakdowns are red flags.
Burnout’s wake-up calls.

Waking up does not make you weak. My professional persona had my soul in a sleeper headlock.

I tried explaining my situation to friends, but I didn’t have the strength to get through it.

Neither did they.
I could tell from the look on their faces.
They were over it.
So was I.

It felt like checkmate in my chest. My employer’s queen advanced. I couldn’t believe I was still choosing to play the game.

Forced into this corporate zugzwang, any move worsened my position.

I knew I couldn’t stay where I was, but my career and the pressure of the paycheck paralyzed me. 

That’s why Phase 1 hurts the most.

Phase 2: Proliferation

Growing pains. You’ve outgrown your circumstances. A routine that doesn’t serve you anymore, a toxic environment you can no longer stand to be a part of, or even a friendship that has run its course.

We’ve tolerated as much pressure, drama, or abuse as we can. We hit our threshold. The overflow tips the scales for us, and we can’t go back.

For a moment, it felt like I was losing my mind. Sometimes breakdowns are just boundaries in disguise.

You're not arrogant for having talent. You're accountable to it. That’s what makes this tension sacred: you know you’re capable of lifting a room, guiding a group, or saving a meeting. But being available to everyone, everywhere, all the time is the fastest way to lose the very thing you came here to protect. Phase 2 is the taking-back-yourself phase of Burnout Your Burnout. 

Being excellent doesn’t mean being endlessly available. You start protecting your time. The cost of your “yes” is higher now. This is investing in the kind of work that can’t be outsourced: following your own mission statement, not anybody else’s.

The American Dream was our operating system. Instead of feeling inspired by it, we felt trapped in it.

There’s a man holding a cardboard sign:
Living the American Dream… Just missing the house, car, and job.

Stuck in a system designed to burn us out.
Work. Sleep. Repeat.
Work. Sleep. Repeat.

We started thinking about what sign we would hold.

That's when something shifts.

Clarity returns.
Pattern recognition requires presence.
And presence only arrives when the panic recedes.

The best-selling Magic Eye poster in the 1990s was titled A New Way of Looking at the World. To see that art takes focus beyond the 2D plane, we allow the brain to interpret the pattern in the poster as 3D. Easier said than done. 

We’re staring cross-eyed into the burnout abyss, following someone else’s rules: work is life, work hard for success, and success will make you happy. Like the hidden art in the Magic Eye, we couldn’t see it.

The old instructions:
Find the right distance.
Focus but don’t focus. 

That never worked for us.
We stopped trying to “get it” their way.

This isn’t magic. It’s your life.

And once it clicks, even for a moment,
you can’t unsee it.

Beyond checklists and bullet points. 
Phase 2 is personal, experiential.

Perfectionists know the high of ticking boxes, and the hollowness that follows. I used to start every list with ‘make a list’ just to win the first round. I was tied to the wins, no matter how small or contrived. These attachments to results tax us. They burn us out. In Phase 2, we stop performing our worth, and we stop bending who we are to fit what we’re told.

Our nature is to rage against the machine.
Our DNA is animal, creative, wild and free.
We’re finding our own dreams to live by.
We’re learning to trust our instincts again.

Phase 3: Remodeling

You, Version 2.0.
This version won’t be perfect.
But perfection isn’t human.
So we don’t want it.
We’re over it.

We can’t keep living in a system that doesn’t inspire.
We won’t continue to fund a future we don’t believe in.

You, Version 2.0.
You, Version Human.

My version 1.0 wasn’t unlocked. I was just unhinged. I was an overachiever with a flamethrower. Naturally, I got burned. Phase 3 is our fire escape.

We're building something that lasts.
Not a quick fix.
Not another performance.

This is the structure of our well-being.
No performance metrics. No checklists.
No LinkedIn-worthy pivot post.
Just building a life that fits you, not them.
On your own terms, and timeline.
You choose your move-in date.

Welcome home.

Coming up, we’ve got reflection work that might make you laugh. And some that might make you cry.
Ideally, a healthy balance of both.

My escape from burnout is tattooed into these pages.
You don’t have to leap like I did.
But your change can begin right now.

◆ You, Version Human

◆ Something about yourself you realize now.
(A strength. A story. A feeling. A fact.)

____________________________________

◆ Something you’re caught up in and ready to break free of.
(A pressure. A drama. An abuse.)

____________________________________

◆ Before we go:
Something about yourself you forgot until this book reminded you.
(A strength. A story. A feeling. A fact.)

____________________________________

◆ Something you’re not anymore:
(A program. A job. A perfectionist.)

____________________________________

◆ Redefine

I used to measure myself by __________.
Now I know that doesn’t define me.


You already began. You don’t need to prove it, you just need to keep going. Look at that, your Version Human already checked the box.
☒ I’m ready for what’s next.