Moving Towards, Not Away From: Why Coaching Matters in Burnout Recovery
When I was recovering from burnout, I had support from the medical system, holistic practitioners, and a coach. All were essential, but they served different purposes.
And there's one principle from Emily Nagoski's work that helped me understand why:
"We thrive when we have a positive goal to move towards, not just a negative state we're trying to move away from."
The difference between escaping and building
After experiencing burnout, particularly workplace burnout, our first instinct is often to escape. To get away from the environment that hurt us. To avoid anything that resembles that experience.
This makes complete sense. When you have been in a chronic freeze state, when you have felt trapped and disempowered, the desire to flee is natural and valid.
But here's what I learned: escaping from something isn't the same as building towards something.
Where coaching comes in
Coaching isn't about escaping from something. It's about building towards somewhere you want to go, with the support and accountability of a trained professional.
Coaches aren't therapists. The work is different.
When you are ready to move towards goals and things you desire in your life, when you are ready to step out of freeze and into intentional action, then that's where a coach plays a really important role and can be an advocate for your forward movement.
My experience
Coaching played a huge role in my recovery, alongside the holistic and medical supports I received. Those coaching skills were tools I applied to move forward from those challenging professional experiences.
The medical support helped me stabilise. The holistic practices helped me regulate my nervous system. But coaching? Coaching helped me envision and build towards a future that felt aligned and energising.
It helped me shift from surviving to thriving.
When to consider coaching
If you're in the thick of burnout right now, your first priority is absolutely stabilising—getting proper medical support, creating moments of safety, allowing your nervous system to regulate.
But when you're ready, when you can feel that shift from "I need to escape this" to "I want to build that"—that's when coaching can play a transformative role.
The power of moving towards
There's something profoundly different about the energy of moving towards a positive goal versus trying to avoid a negative state.
One keeps you focused on threat. The other opens up possibility.
One keeps your nervous system on high alert. The other allows you to imagine and create.
When we are dealing with burnout and the freeze state, we often feel we have no choice because we have so many responsibilities. And that's real, those constraints are real.
But within those constraints, there's still the question: What do I want to build? What lights me up? Where am I going?
Having support to explore and pursue those questions changes everything.
If you're navigating burnout or the freeze state, know that you don't have to have all the answers right now. Sometimes healing begins with simply understanding what's happening in your body. And when you're ready to build towards something, support is available.