Description

In today's episode of The Wellbeing Wanderer Podcast Kat is joined by Shauna Moran — a systemic team coach and executive coach who specialises in workplace burnout prevention.

Shauna’s work comes from lived experience: after multiple burnouts in her own corporate career she went back to study psychology, qualified as an executive coach, and wrote The Book of Managing Employee Burnout (2021).

In this frank, practical conversation we peel back and unpack what burnout really is, how it shows up in the body and the workplace, why self-care alone won’t solve systemic stress, and practical steps for leaders and individuals to reduce chronic workplace harm and reclaim wellbeing. Evidence, nervous-system tools and real, usable ideas.

If you are a leader and care about showing up better for the people and work you love or you are experiencing burnout, tune in, this episode is for you

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Key points covered:

• What burnout actually is: WHO classifies it as an occupational phenomenon caused by chronic, prolonged workplace stress that hasn’t been successfully managed.

• How burnout shows up: Emotional and physical exhaustion, cynicism/withdrawal, sleep disruption, drop in cognitive clarity — and long-term risks like depression.

• Five stages of burnout (overview): honeymoon → onset of stress → chronic stress/withdrawal → habitual burnout; later stages are harder to recover from.

• Three Pillars to Burnout Reduction (Shauna’s framework):

  • Individual pillar: personal regulation, boundaries, non-negotiables, self-care practices and personal development.

  • Leadership pillar: leaders’ behaviours, unfair treatment, psychological safety, and leaders’ ability/skill to support teams.

  • Organisation pillar: systemic factors — workload design, meetings culture, role clarity, resourcing and processes.

• Unmanageable workload is a major root cause: realistic timelines, role clarity and resource gaps drive burnout — rest alone won’t fix a systemic workload problem.

• Use data to advocate for change: track actual hours, task lists and time spent to move conversations from “I feel overwhelmed” to evidence-based requests for resources or reprioritisation.

• Self-care vs systemic change: self-care helps regulate you but is not a cure when chronic stressors remain — organisations must change systems, not only tell individuals to cope better.

• Nervous-system & neuroscience work: Shauna blends neuro-science (how we form new patterns), polyvagal theory and nervous-system regulation to help leaders and teams create safety and better decision-making.

• Practical personal practices Shauna uses: daily self-ratings (mental clarity, emotional state, physical energy, spiritual connection) to tune into needs and plan the day.

• Leadership, vulnerability & duality: leaders showing appropriate vulnerability and processed regulation model resilience — you can hold multiple realities (joy + grief) at once.

• Concrete steps for people in high-pressure roles (doctors, nurses, NHS contexts): collect workload data, ask for prioritisation, propose specific resource solutions (hire/delegate/prioritise), and create short-term plans while longer hires are arranged.