Burnout… or a Breakthrough? 5 Signs You’ve Outgrown Your Life

 

Just when you thought you were reaching your life’s goals, in come some strange new feelings, upsetting your equilibrium, your joy, and your sense of ease.

It’s common for smart women in their late 30s, 40s, even 50s. It usually doesn’t happen during a huge crisis. In fact, it may occur when everything feels pretty downright ordinary.

You’re sitting in a meeting you’ve attended dozens of times, looking at your calendar for the week, or having a conversation you’ve had a hundred times before.

But suddenly you notice something.

You already know how everything is going to unfold. You know exactly what to expect, what you will have to endure, what will happen next. And it no longer feels like reaching for the next big thing.

Instead, you feel restless.

Not because things are going badly. Nothing has changed except you. Something inside you seems to be rejecting your outer world.

For many women, the rejection sounds something like:

• Maybe I’m just tired.
  
• I need a vacation.
  
• I’m just burned out.
  
• I need to power through.
  
• I’ll get back on track.
  
• I shouldn’t feel this way.
  
• I should be grateful.
  

If you’ve been wrestling with these types of thoughts, you’re not alone.

After all, we’ve been trained to just accept what we’ve been given, or what magically sort of appears and is called our lives. But I want to give you another perspective.

Perhaps you’ve simply outgrown your current circumstance.

Today, we’re going to talk about the five signals that tend to appear when your life has become too small for who you’re becoming.

 

Expansion Signals

After talking with so many women in this stage of life, I’ve noticed a pattern. There are a handful of signs that tend to appear that mean someone has outgrown the life that they’ve built.

I call them expansion signals, subtle indicators that your life is ready to grow beyond its current structure. You are ready for more.

These signals often start whispering quietly at you, but when you don’t listen, they end up taking over the peace, joy, and hope in your life.

The good news is that when you start to recognize the signals that you’re ready for more, you can take action to change your future circumstances. There’s a little bit more to it than that.

As we walk through them, simply notice which ones resonate with you. I’ve got a few questions in there to help you start thinking about how you’re thinking about the expansion signals that show up in your life.

 

Expansion Signal #1: Feeling Mentally Under-Challenged

The first expansion signal is feeling mentally under-challenged.

You’re still good at what you do, maybe even better than you’ve ever been. That’s not the problem. But the work that once stimulated you now feels predictable, unmoving.

You can anticipate meetings before they happen. You already know the problems that’ll be discussed. You already know the likely solutions. Maybe you feel like you have the answers to solve problems when the gang continues to go back and forth, around and around. The work begins to feel like a waste of time and your skill set.

And when that happens, many high performers start to think that something’s wrong with them right off the bat, as though the situation is something that they have to get over, get some time away from, or maybe just a tiny shake-up.

I would argue that they’re not seeing the bigger picture.

Sometimes the truth is much simpler.

You’ve just mastered the environment that you’re in, and mastery without new growth creates restlessness.

Here’s a question to consider:

• When work starts feeling predictable, boring, and you feel unengaged, what do you make that mean about you?
  
• Do you automatically start thinking about how you can expand your life?
  
• Or do you tend to default to thinking about ways to fix you to fit into your current circumstances?
  

The difference in how you think about solving the problem of feeling under-challenged, bored, or just over your current circumstances will absolutely determine whether you continue to repeat the same pattern of feeling stuck or make changes that will transform you into your next phase.

Your brain is really good at self-doubt, and it would much rather that you just stay within that safety zone of your current life. It loves mastery. You’ve got mastery over your current life, job, income, city, and relationship.

Why change now?

Because changing means risk, uncertainty, discomfort, and lots of effort. Likely, your brain wants you to stay safe, but the question for you is:

• What do you want for your life beyond what you already have going on?
  
  

Expansion Signal #2: A Drop in Tolerance

The next signal that you are ready for expansion is a drop in tolerance.

Tolerance—your ability to put up with people, interactions, problems, and things.

And what you might notice if you’re experiencing this signal is that your tolerance for all of these problems, projects, differing opinions, drama, bureaucracy, and talking in circles about the same old things is drastically reduced.

Things you once brushed off or accepted as a part of the job or your day-to-day life now just irritate you. Where you used to be inspired, you are no longer.

Maybe it’s the surface-level nature of your conversations. Maybe it is the slow processes or decision-making that happens at work. Maybe it is organizational politics.

You might find yourself thinking:

• Why am I always in a bad mood?
  
• Why is it so hard to get up and go to work?
  
• Why does this bother me so much now when it seemed okay before?
  

You might be easily frustrated, angered, annoyed, or just outright disgusted by your life.

But what is clear is that you are probably filled with negativity, negative thoughts and feelings that are making it hard to show up and be as productive as you used to be.

Maybe you’re getting so tired of tolerating your circumstances that you’ve checked out altogether. This is what they call quiet quitting.

While it’s easy to blame the situation, the circumstances, the challenges, the conflicts, and the people, the reality is that the change has happened mostly within you.

Your standards have evolved, your preferences have evolved, and your interests have evolved. If your circumstances have not, then that is likely to bring you a lot of discomfort.

Notice the thought that arises when you feel irritation.

Is the thought something like:

• This is a waste of time
  
• Or this shouldn’t be that hard?
  

Your brain is rising up to let you know, loud and clear, that there is misalignment. You’re experiencing discomfort in your own life, but you’re stuck because you’re focusing on blame—of the people, the circumstances, the situation—instead of owning and empowering yourself, instead of owning your responsibility to create the right life conditions that suit you.

The question is, if you’re going to experience discomfort either way, whether you stay in your current life or totally pivot into a 180, you’re going to have some discomfort.

So would you rather experience intentional discomfort, the kind that happens with expansion, when you move toward something or someone that you want to be in your future? Or would you rather experience the same discomfort you’ve been spinning in, a plan, a pivot, a value add? Or continue to experience the same discomfort?

How long are you willing to tolerate what no longer fits?

 

Expansion Signal #3: Feeling Your Potential Is Being Underutilized

The third expansion signal is feeling that your potential is being underutilized.

You start to realize that you’re capable of operating at a higher level than your current environment requires. Maybe not only that, but you’re capable of operating on a totally different level than your environment requires.

You see better strategies, you have better solutions, better ways of approaching problems. Maybe you want to focus on completely different problems, but the system around you doesn’t always create space for that level of thinking.

You’re not overwhelmed, you’re under-expressed, confined. A bird with clipped wings.

It’s basically saying, this place is too small for me. I’m not able to be myself here. I’m looking to bring my talents in a different direction.

It’s surprisingly draining when your thoughts go to blame and excuses.

Sometimes we start to feel that we’ve reached our ceiling in our current roles. Maybe there isn’t much room for promotion or for expanding responsibilities. Maybe you’re working under a leadership that doesn’t see your leadership potential.

Maybe you want more and see yourself as ready for it before you actually are. Maybe you think you’re ready for more, but you actually have some work to do to expand your capacity to hold more responsibility or more leadership.

Over my career, I’ve encountered a lot of women who believe that they’re ready for the next level, to take on more responsibility or leadership. But they may have had blind spots about their skill gaps or attitude gaps, or maybe they were missing key attributes of emotional intelligence, like interpersonal connection.

And those things held them back from becoming truly ready and reflecting that readiness to the people that matter, like leadership, for example.

I’ve also seen a lot of women in job roles or industries where it is 100% clear that their potential is underused, sometimes because they’re simply not expressing it in the right arena.

Maybe they aren’t doing well. They don’t seem like they’re good at their job because they don’t like their job.

And I’ve also encountered many women who find themselves in an environment that doesn’t acknowledge their readiness for the next level at all, even when it would be well-deserved.

I have been each of these women. Most of us have or will be at one point or another.

It happens because we’re not given a roadmap at the beginning of our adult lives that explains the perfect life design for our passions, our skills, and our natural talents. And even when we think we have the map figured out, life goes and changes things up on us.

Through each stage and each experience, we change, grow, and outgrow our own lives.

So when you’re feeling underutilized, it is worth reflecting on not the past, where we’ve been, and what we’re doing now, and how we can directly use those skills elsewhere. But it’s worth it to be aspirational, to ask:

• What are the possibilities for me?
  
• Where can I take what I know and grow those skills and expand those skills?
  
• Where can I find meaning and provide value with my talents, my experience, and my passions going forward?
  

You’re not going to get where you want to go next with the same thing that got you to where you are now.

Is your current environment allowing you to express your true self, your true capacity, your full spectrum of awesomeness that you want to express, the woman you want to be tomorrow or five years down the road?

Does the environment that you’re in have space for you to continue to grow into your full potential? Or is it holding you back from becoming who you want to be next?

Are you busy fulfilling a role that aligns with who you were and have been, rather than who you’re becoming?

 

Expansion Signal #4: Your Mind Begins to Explore Other Possibilities

The fourth signal that you’re ready for expansion is your mind beginning to explore other possibilities.

Escapism.

Many people use this term as a bad thing, as though when you daydream about getting away to someplace else, it’s a terrible thing, right? You must love where you’re at.

Sure, escapism can be a negative value-add if you are expressing your desire to get away, move on, transform by buffering, like overeating, overthinking, overdrinking, overscrolling. You get it?

In other words, overcompensating for your discontentment in ways that are likely not the best for you. That’s like self-sabotage. You’re avoiding, rather than facing, your negative thoughts and emotions by stuffing your face or doing drugs or something like that.

At one point or another, we all find ourselves seeking escape from our lives. And instead of judging or shaming ourselves for it, we need to explore where it’s coming from and start thinking about the possibilities for change.

Escapism of any sort, positive or negative, is a very strong signal that your current life is misaligned with your future self, that it is time to choose differently for you.

So you start imagining different paths, different environments, leaving behind your current life in one way or another.

Maybe it’s moving away, downsizing or upsizing, you know, the dream house, right-sizing. Maybe it’s rage-quitting your job or hopping companies, switching roles or careers, or marrying someone so you don’t have to work at all. Maybe you want to become a trad wife, or leave a relationship to get your sense of self back. Maybe you want to go to school.

There are a million different ways to start imagining possibilities for your life.

I’m going to tell you about the one big dream that I have, that I have no idea how I’m going to make happen, given the other various responsibilities and things like that. And that is: I want to live on a cruise ship that tours the world for a year or two.

Now, I don’t know if I want to stay there for the rest of my life. Probably not, given that I know that I’m going to get bored of it and I’m going to want to move on to a new dream, a new goal, a new experience.

But I can’t wait.

I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but it’s right there, and I am moving in that direction.

So the specific areas where you’re imagining something different, whether it’s totally wild or not that hard to conceive, those are clues about what you want and need to change.

So make it simple. Listen to them as clues. It is you telling you what needs to change.

Instead, many women shut themselves down, shut down their ideas, thinking useless thoughts:

• Oh, that’s unreasonable
  
• That’s unrealistic
  
• Oh, it’s too late
  
• I’m too old
  
• It’s too risky
  
• My husband won’t like that
  

Notice how quickly curiosity can be shut down by a single thought.

And that’s all it is. It’s just a thought, right?

We often immediately start to think about how we could make the dreams come to life and immediately figure, okay, I’ve got to dismiss it because it doesn’t seem like something I’ve done before.

And then we base our abilities on who we have been, rather than who we have the potential to become if we take those steps forward.

So that tendency is so ingrained in us that we won’t even let ourselves think about what we want. And that is a shame.

So when you shut down curiosity about what you really want to be doing with your life, you shut down the possibility of expansion. You’re creating the same result that you wish weren’t there because of the way that you’re thinking about it.

So first, get honest about what you want for your future, and worry about the how later. It is one foot in front of the next, and that is how you get there. That is how you build a dream.

So what areas of your life do you feel that you are trying to escape, and what are you going to do about it?

If your future had limitless potential:

• What would it look like?
  
• What would it feel like?
  
• What would you feel like?
  
• Where would you live?
  
• Who would you be around?
  
• Who would you absolutely not be around?
  

Lay out the truth. That is the first step.

 

Expansion Signal #5: Restlessness Despite Stability

So the fifth expansion signal is restlessness despite stability.

Nothing is objectively wrong. Your life is probably even successful in many areas.

But something inside you feels unsettled, confused. It doesn’t feel like enough.

I’ve been there.

And many women interpret this as just simple unhappiness or dissatisfaction, but it is something more.

Growth-oriented people, smart, capable women, aren’t wired just for stability, despite what society wants us to believe. We’re wired for expansion, for learning, for becoming, for evolving.

I say this as if it’s equally obvious to all of us, but it’s not.

Some people seem to be perfectly content with a simple life, but that isn’t you, or you wouldn’t be here. And that sure ain’t me, sister.

You’re here because you’re at a crossroads. Or you’re likely bumping up against a ceiling in your life. You’re stewing on something, you’re contemplating, you’re escaping or dreaming, and you might be feeling stuck or confused about why.

When your life choices start to lose their luster, when you stop growing or learning, the mind starts to wander. It naturally starts searching for the next horizon.

It’s pretty simple. It’s not a bad thing either.

Remember, we’re meant to evolve.

When the conditions of your life remain the same, you’re bound to get restless.

Good.

Oftentimes, we get restless, and we default to thinking, I’m not happy, my life’s boring, you know? And we get stuck thinking about that, as if life should be great all of the time and that we should be happy and content all of the time.

Well, that is not realistic.

There will be confusion at various points. There will be boredom, no matter what you choose to do. And there will always be frustration and conflict. Life is hard.

There will always be discomfort, whether you stay where you are today or make a decision to expand your life. There’s just different kinds of discomfort: the one you know versus the one you don’t.

Yet when you feel restlessness, what are you making it mean?

• Are you blaming your restlessness on your life conditions, what’s happening around you, or to you?
  
• Do you feel stuck by all of the things you believe you have to do?
  
• Or do you believe that restlessness is an opportunity to empower yourself to move beyond the conditions of your current life, that everything in life is a choice that you have, if you choose it is taking accountability for your life?
  

One way of thinking positions you as a victim of circumstance, but the other gives you the power to take life by the reins and take a brand-new trail anywhere you want.

So ask yourself:

• Is it possible that something new is trying to emerge here, and my mind is trying to block it?
  

Remember, you have free will. You have autonomy. You can choose again as many times as you want to.

 

Burnout or Outgrowing Your Life?

Many women misinterpret what they’re feeling when they get these signals. They experience the signals, they ignore them, they minimize them, and they make excuses. They try to avoid them so that they’ll just go away.

But guess what?

It very rarely works.

Those responses lead to burnout, not expansion.

Burnout and outgrowing your life can feel very similar, so it’s hard to tell the difference. But the causes are different, and the decisions that would be ideal to emerge from them are different.

Burnout happens when you’re overloaded.

Outgrowing happens when you’re under-expanded, when you’re not living up to your potential.

Burnout drains your energy.

Outgrowing creates restlessness, dreaming, and drive.

Burnout requires recovery.

Outgrowing requires evolution.

Confusing the two can keep someone stuck for years, stuck in a cycle of going round and round, blaming, unsure thinking, and not moving to a decision.

But there can also be some overlap between the two.

So ask yourself honestly:

• Does your experience feel more like burnout or exhaustion?
  
• Or does it feel more like misalignment or outgrowing your own life?
  

And how long have you been circling the same questions about your life or career?

Many capable women stay in that stage for years, not because they lack courage, but because they lack clarity.

So once you recognize the signals, a crossroads finally appears. And there, a decision can be made to break through.

• Stay where you are.
  
• Pivot.
  
• Redesign something about your life.
  

The options are endless.

 

Burnout or Breakthrough 7-Day Challenge

Inside the Burnout or Breakthrough seven-day challenge that I am working on right now, we walk through a structured process to help you evaluate what is happening in your life.

• What kind of a change do you need?
  
• What’s creating the tension you’re feeling?
  
• Whether it’s burnout or whether your life has simply outgrown its current structure?
  

Those two situations require different decisions.

And the mini-course that I’m creating is designed for women who are coming up on a crossroads and want to get unstuck and move to a decision point about the next life phase so they can quit spiraling and circling over and over.

It’s a self-driven course, but you’ll also have 24/7 messaging access to me, a certified coach, for feedback, perspective, support, and someone to bounce your ideas off of.

So if you are interested in making a decision and moving forward in your life, join the waitlist for this seven-day challenge. It is on my website, on my Red Chair Sessions page.

Wait List —-->>> Red Chair Sessions page

 

Closing

Listen. Your life isn’t meant to stay static.

You’re meant to evolve.

Sometimes the quiet restlessness you feel is simply the first signal that the next chapter is ready for you.

And you don’t need to be perfectly ready. You just need to make a decision and take the first step.

You may surprise yourself in how much you can actually do.

 

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