The Mental Fitness Shift That Prevents Burnout – An Interview with Liz Bell
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
Liz Bell is a Career and Positive Intelligence® Coach who helps purpose-driven women overcome burnout, self-doubt and unhelpful mental habits to create fulfilling and impactful careers.
In this interview, Liz shares the hidden mental patterns and misconceptions that can lead to burnout, keep people stuck in their careers, and recreate burnout even after changing jobs, a practical skill to create greater self-awareness before making any major change, and the power of mental fitness to meet all challenges in work and life.
Liz Bell, Career and Positive Intelligence® Coach
What first made you realise that burnout was not just about workload, but about the way we think and respond to challenges?
I had switched careers. Things seemed to be going really well. Then I noticed I was starting to feel frustrated more and more. This was how I had felt in the lead-up to my experience of burnout.
I was noticing similar patterns of behaviour, such as staying busy with low-priority tasks, neglecting my own goals in favour of supporting others, and putting off some tasks until I felt ready. The situation was different. The work was different. The challenges were different. The responses were the same.
I was also seeing it in my clients. They were making great progress when they were working with me. Once they left me, their progress faltered. The responses to the new challenges were the same as to the old challenges.
If I were going to have the business I wanted and be able to help my clients achieve sustainable change, I needed to understand these patterns of thinking, where they came from, and what could be done to address them.
In your experience, what hidden patterns most often keep purpose-driven women stuck in careers that no longer feel aligned?
The most common hidden patterns keeping purpose-driven women stuck in careers that no longer feel aligned are not being able to set and maintain clear boundaries in the workplace, such as saying yes when you really want to say no, working harder in order to catch up with work not completed during times of supporting others or focusing on low-priority tasks, perfectionism, getting caught up in the details on projects that are already good enough, doing the next thing and the next and you’ll have demonstrated your value, and being hyper aware of the risks in everything and losing focus and connection to what truly matters.
The misalignment comes not from the career but from how these hidden patterns can distract them from doing the work in a meaningful way.
You combine career coaching with Positive Intelligence®. What shifts when someone starts strengthening their mental fitness alongside making career decisions?
They start to recognise their self-sabotaging behaviours and are able to respond to them with compassion rather than judgement. This leads to seeing greater possibilities and making bolder, more aligned career decisions.
A client who lacked the confidence in her entrepreneurship to increase the income of her business identified and implemented a new structure that increased her income and the number of clients she could serve. In one month, these changes had given her a return on her investment in coaching of 100%.
They make decisions aligned with their goals, not their fears. A client was offered two roles. One easy and safe. The other felt more fulfilling, aligned, and challenging. Strengthening her mental fitness helped her make a decision that supported her professional growth. She is still in the role today and has never regretted the decision.
They are able to renew their professional confidence and see their true value. A senior manager with a 30-plus-year career in the legal sector was judging her future opportunities by her lack of secondary school qualifications. With the help of strengthening her mental fitness, she was able to accept that her extraordinary career was evidence of her abilities and is now using her extensive knowledge and skills as a business consultant.
Why do some people recreate the same burnout patterns even after changing jobs, industries, or starting their own business?
The same burnout patterns are recreated even after changing jobs, industries, or starting their own business, because they are unconscious patterns.
These patterns remain hidden from us until we shine a light on them and bring them into view. It’s like being on autopilot. So, circumstances show up that create stress, frustration, self-doubt, and they repeat the patterns in response to these feelings.
When they don’t have the skills and/or the self-knowledge to be able to recognise these patterns for what they are, they might start criticising themselves, others or the circumstances. This compounds the patterned behaviour and increases the stress patterns that can lead to burnout.
The change has provided some relief from their stress. It’s like putting a plaster on an open wound. The wound won’t heal properly and will cause problems again in the future.
What misconceptions about career fulfillment do you see most often in ambitious women today?
Most ambitious women today see career fulfillment as being about what they do, where they do it, how they do it, or who they do it with or for.
Don’t get me wrong, these things are important too. But unless they’ve done the internal work first, it’s difficult to truly identify the environmental factors that they need to thrive.
Fulfillment is an inside job. We feel most fulfilled when we are focused and energised. It’s one of the reasons ambitious women have a hard time finding a fulfilling job. They focus on the what, where, and who, not the how.
When we show up to something we don’t want to do with negative emotions and thinking there can be little or no fulfillment. Not in the doing or the completion. But when we show up with more positive emotions and thinking, we can have a greater sense of fulfillment, even in the most mundane of essential tasks.
When someone feels trapped between financial security and meaningful work, where should they begin?
What I often see is women focusing on job titles and salaries. They struggle to find anything that looks like meaningful work because they haven’t established what financial security and meaningful work mean to them.
They should always start with the money. After all, we can’t survive without it. What we need is personal. Do the maths. Be clear about what is needed.
So few women do this. Even fewer talk to the co-contributors of the household income. Shame, guilt, and self-doubt often get in the way. Some of the women I work with are often surprised to learn what they actually spend and what on.
There is a big difference between financial security and maintaining the same level of income. Unless all their earnings go on the rent/mortgage, car, kids, food and household bills, there’s often something left over.
Once they know exactly what financial security actually looks like, they can make informed decisions about current and future spending and saving.
That’s when the work on what ‘meaningful work’ looks like for them can begin. We’re far more creative in our thinking when we’re not feeling the stress of insecurity. Meaningful work can then take on many forms and even come with many income streams.
What is one small practice that can help people build greater self-awareness before making a major career change?
One small practice that can help people build greater self-awareness before making a major career change is to connect with their life goals. To create a space for quiet contemplation of what will be most important to them at the end of their lives.
The act of considering ourselves at the end of our lives, healthy of mind and body, looking back, having lived a full and happy life, can be really helpful when thinking about what is most important for us to consider when making a major career change.
Considering domains of our life, such as relationships, spirituality, wellness, finances, and career, can illuminate what is truly important to us. Becoming aware of this can help generate greater self-awareness and inform the alignment of any major career change with our bigger goals.
How has your own journey through burnout shaped the way you support clients today?
I have so much more compassion for myself, and that enables me to have a lot of compassion for my clients! Burnout sucks! For me, it led me away from everything that I held dear, my values, my goals, and dreams, and I went to a very dark place. My mental health suffered, and I had to take time off work to recover.
I am also aware that what led to my burnout and is hampering my clients is something that is common to most of us, life-saving strategies developed in early life that haven’t been updated to respond to the challenges we face as adults.
I don’t see burnout as a personal failure. It is a misalignment between what we are doing and what we need to do to achieve our goals. I see it as an opportunity for a reset, a do-over.
What I teach my clients is the very same mental fitness practice I use every day. It supports my sustainably fulfilling career whilst reducing the occurrence of patterned behaviour that can lead to burnout. I know it can support them in the same way, too.
If readers take away one idea about creating a sustainable and fulfilling career, what would you want it to be?
In a word, adaptation. Mental fitness is the ability to adapt to the challenges of work and life with a positive mindset. A career is not a job. It is all the jobs you will have across the course of your lifetime. That may take place in different sectors, in different countries, and in different stages of your life.
Adaptation is about how you approach your work, how you adjust to your environment, and how you modify your behaviour to get the best out of others without losing who you are.
Learning to be adaptable in this way is key to creating a meaningful and fulfilling career sustainably.
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