How a Culture of Self-Abandonment Can Fuel Workplace Burnout
Samka Keranovic is a certified life, NLP, and neuroscience coach and co-founder of Desert Roots Wellness, whose work has appeared in Fast Company. With 16 years of private coaching experience, she specializes in helping high achievers overcome burnout, people-pleasing, and indecision.
Imagine a vice president of operations sitting in a quarterly planning meeting. The chief executive officer proposes a new initiative. The timeline is aggressive. The scope is vague. The VP has questions that could expose problems before the team commits.
Instead of asking, the VP nods, says, “We can make that work,” and volunteers the team for the heavy lifting. The meeting ends with apparent agreement and concerns that nobody has voiced.
This hypothetical scene illustrates a pattern worth examining: a capable person setting aside their judgment to keep the room comfortable. When a workplace repeatedly rewards that response, it can hide unreasonable demands and make them harder to challenge.
Burnout has multiple contributors. Workload, resources, control, and support matter. But leaders also need to ask whether their culture makes it difficult for people to acknowledge their limits or say what they actually think.
My perspective brings together 16 years of private coaching and more than 20 years of corporate leadership. I use the term self-abandonment to describe repeatedly overriding your needs, limits, or judgment to preserve approval or avoid conflict. It is a coaching lens, not a clinical diagnosis, and it offers one way to examine how workplace expectations become personally costly.
What if the problem is more than the hours?
The World Health Organization describes burnout as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. Its definition includes exhaustion, increased distance or cynicism toward work, and reduced professional efficacy. Self-abandonment does not replace that definition. It can help us explore one pattern that allows workplace stress to persist.
Consider the professional who accepts a deadline they believe is unrealistic, the manager who absorbs every unresolved problem, or the leader who privately doubts a strategy but says nothing because the founder has already committed.
Each response can conceal information the organization needs. An overloaded team appears to have capacity. A deadline appears achievable. A decision appears to have support. The pressure continues because the signals that might prompt a change never reach the people making decisions.
Wellness resources and time off can help. Their value is limited, however, when people return to the same demands and the same consequences for questioning them. Rest and organizational change need to work together.
What does this pattern look like at work?
Agreeing in the room and doubting afterward. You leave a meeting and tell a colleague, “That’s not going to work.” The concern was there during the discussion, but saying it aloud felt too risky.
Saying yes before checking capacity. You accept another assignment, then spend the week trying to make it fit around commitments that have not changed. What sounded like flexibility becomes an unspoken workload increase.
Presenting certainty you do not feel. You defend a plan without mentioning the assumptions that worry you. Over time, maintaining that appearance can become another demand on your attention.
These behaviors do not, by themselves, establish that someone is experiencing burnout. They are reasons to ask better questions about workload, expectations, and whether honest communication feels safe.
Silence is not always a failure of confidence. Sometimes it reflects an accurate reading of a workplace where disagreement has consequences. Leaders need to examine those consequences before asking employees to be more assertive.
What is it costing the company?
When employees routinely withhold concerns, leaders make decisions with incomplete information. A meeting full of agreement may reveal less about the strength of a plan than about how comfortable people feel questioning it.
Hidden workload creates another problem. If the most dependable person continually absorbs overflow, the organization can mistake personal sacrifice for adequate staffing. That makes it harder to see where responsibilities, resources, or priorities need to change.
The same pattern can affect innovation. An employee who expects an idea to be dismissed may stop offering it. A manager who has seen colleagues penalized for flagging risks may wait until a problem is impossible to ignore.
Retention deserves a broader view as well. People leave jobs for many reasons, including pay, workload, opportunity, and management. A culture that makes honest participation costly can be part of that decision. Leaders should investigate rather than assume that a quiet employee is a satisfied one. The business question is practical. What information are we missing because someone believes it is safer to agree?
What happens when the pressure follows you home?
A difficult workday can end without feeling finished. You are at dinner, but still rehearsing the conversation you avoided. You are spending time with your children, but mentally rearranging the work you agreed to take on.
That does not mean every distracted evening signals burnout. It does mean that the cost of work can extend beyond the hours recorded on a calendar. Unresolved concerns, resentment, and worry can consume attention long after the workday ends.
Notice whether the same response appears elsewhere in your life. Do you agree to plans you do not have capacity for? Do you avoid a necessary conversation because someone might be disappointed? Recognizing that pattern can help you identify where a different response is possible. The aim is to preserve enough time and attention to participate in the life your work is meant to support.
How can professionals rebuild trust in their judgment?
Start with a pause before committing. What do I actually think, and what capacity do I have? Separate your assessment of the request from your wish to make the conversation comfortable.
Then make the concern specific. Instead of a reluctant yes, you might say, “I can take this on, but we need to decide which existing priority moves.” Or, “Before we commit, I want to flag a concern about the timeline.” These statements give the other person something concrete to address.
You do not need to disclose every feeling or challenge every decision. The practice is to recognize when relevant information is being withheld and choose a useful way to communicate it.
Consider the setting, too. A private conversation or written clarification may be more effective than raising an issue in a large meeting. Where retaliation is a realistic concern, individual courage is not an adequate substitute for organizational protection and support.
Self-trust can help you name a limit. Making that limit workable may still require your manager to change the assignment, deadline, or resources.
How can leaders make honesty useful and safe?
Let the senior person speak last. Before stating your preferred answer, ask others to assess the proposal. Give people a chance to form and share their judgment without first having to disagree with yours.
Ask questions that require more than reassurance. “What would make this plan fail?” and “What would we need to stop doing to deliver this?” can surface risks and capacity constraints that a general request for feedback misses.
Respond constructively before you know whether the concern is correct. Thank someone for raising a relevant issue, examine the evidence, and explain the decision. People should not have to predict the outcome perfectly to be treated respectfully.
Make tradeoffs visible. When new work arrives, name what will move, what can wait, and who has capacity. Review how often the same employees provide emergency coverage or work beyond agreed hours. Do not treat repeated overextension as proof that the arrangement is sustainable.
Close the loop. If someone flags an unrealistic deadline, tell them what changed or why it did not. If feedback repeatedly disappears into silence, invitations to speak up lose credibility.
These practices need to sit alongside adequate staffing, manageable demands, clear responsibilities, and genuine opportunities to recover. A culture of honesty is valuable when it changes how work is organized.
What would sustainable performance look like?
A useful starting point is whether people can acknowledge uncertainty, question a deadline, and discuss capacity without having their commitment doubted. Leaders can then look for practical changes, earlier risks raised, clearer decisions about priorities, and fewer assignments sustained by unplanned overtime.
No single conversation or coaching practice can guarantee better retention, innovation, or recovery from burnout. But an honest conversation can reveal a problem that polite agreement keeps hidden. What leaders do with that information determines whether speaking up becomes worthwhile.
For professionals, progress may begin with one accurate statement about what they see or what they can reasonably deliver. For companies, it begins with taking that statement seriously enough to consider changing the work.
Where does your team’s apparent capacity depend on someone being unwilling to disappoint you?
Read more from Samka Keranovic
Samka Keranovic, Certified Holistic Life Coach, NLP Practitioner & Neuroscience Coach
Samka Keranovic is a certified holistic life coach, NLP practitioner, and neuroscience coach who spent two decades in corporate leadership before building the coaching practice she once needed herself. As co-founder of Desert Roots Wellness, she works with high achievers and business owners who are successful on paper but quietly exhausted, helping them break free from people-pleasing, burnout, and indecision. Her work is grounded in 16 years of private coaching experience and the belief that real transformation comes from lived experience, not theory. Samka has been featured in Fast Company, Authority Magazine, and CHRO Daily, and works with clients internationally from Scottsdale, Arizona.
Reference:
World Health Organization, Burn-out an occupational phenomenon
