Employee engagement surveys give us a lot of data. But what does that data actually tell us?

In this first Survey Says episode, I’m looking at two questions from the 2024 U.S. Office of Personnel Management Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey through the burnout and mismatch lens. When only 48% of employees respond positively to whether management involves them in decisions that affect their work, it’s tempting to conclude that employees need more autonomy.

But another question in the same survey complicates that assumption.

The bigger lesson? A survey result is a signal, not a diagnosis.

In this episode, I explore why the same survey score can reflect very different employee experiences, why more autonomy and involvement aren't automatically better, and what questions we can ask to understand what's actually happening underneath the numbers.

In this episode, I cover:

• Why employee engagement survey results are a starting point, not a diagnosis
• The difference between employee involvement and satisfaction with that involvement
• Why a low autonomy score doesn't automatically mean employees need more autonomy
• How different workplace conditions can produce the same survey result
• The mismatch between where decision-making authority lives and where knowledge about the work lives
• Why the right amount of autonomy depends on the person and the work
• Questions we can ask to uncover what's happening underneath an engagement survey score
• Why getting curious is more useful than jumping straight from data to solutions

Questions I’d ask next

If employees report low involvement in decisions that affect their work, I want more information before deciding what needs to change.

• Which decisions do employees actually want more involvement in?
• Which recent decisions have positively or negatively affected their ability to do their jobs?
• What decisions are being made without information from the people closest to the work?
• When employees give input, do they know what happens to it?
• What would employees happily never be consulted about again?

Employee engagement surveys aren't the end of the exploration. They're the beginning of it.

The question isn't simply, “How do we give people more autonomy?”

It’s:

Do people have the appropriate amount of influence over the decisions that affect their ability to do their work?

About the Host

Cait Donovan is a globally recognized keynote speaker, one of the world’s leading burnout experts, and host of FRIED. The Burnout Podcast, a top 1% podcast with more than 1 million downloads.

With a background in biobehavioral health and Chinese medicine, Cait takes a systems-based approach to burnout, helping organizations, leaders, and individuals understand burnout not as a personal failure, but as a mismatch between people and the environments in which they work.

Cait is the author of The Bouncebackability Factor and the forthcoming Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations. Her work has been featured in Forbes, NPR, The New York Post, and other major media outlets.

Bring Cait to your organization: Learn more about Cait’s keynotes and workplace burnout programs at https://caitdonovan.com

I worked with a CEO who was burning out, but here's what made the situation interesting: they were really good at their job. They had a supportive board. They had a supportive staff. The rest of the organization wasn't burning out.

So what the hell was going on?

When we started looking for the mismatch, one word kept coming up: urgency.

This CEO was moving faster than everyone around them. They were answering emails before the person responsible for them had a chance to respond. They were going to meetings they didn't need to be in. They'd set a deadline for Friday, finish their part by Wednesday, and then get frustrated that everyone else wasn't moving at the same pace.

The CEO thought they were helping. Their staff experienced it differently.

In this #straightfromcait episode of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, I'm breaking down how we identified this pace mismatch, what the CEO's urgency was communicating to the rest of the team, and what had to happen to change it. I also talk about why "slow down" can mean very different things depending on the mismatch you're actually trying to solve.

This is also a little preview of the idea at the center of my upcoming book, Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations. Sometimes good people burn out in organizations that are mostly doing things right. The question isn't always, "What's broken here?"

Sometimes the better question is: Where's the mismatch?

Key Topics Covered

• A real example of a CEO burning out inside a healthy, supportive organization
• The behaviors that helped us identify the mismatch: answering other people's emails, going to meetings unnecessarily, and racing ahead of their own deadlines
• How one leader's internal sense of urgency created a pace mismatch with the rest of the organization
• Why doing things for your staff isn't necessarily helpful, especially when it starts communicating that you don't trust them
• The difference between the major slowdown that can be necessary during burnout recovery and dialing your pace down a couple of notches
• Why naming the mismatch made it much easier to figure out what needed to change
• What the CEO had to do to understand the fear underneath their urgency
• Why fixing a mismatch requires participation from both the person and the organization
• A first look at my upcoming book, Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations



About Your Host

Cait Donovan is a keynote speaker, globally recognized burnout expert, and host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, a top 1% show with over one million downloads. She's the author of The Bouncebackability Factor and is currently writing her second book, Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations, releasing October 2026.

With more than 3,700 five-star keynote reviews and a 99% approval rating, Cait helps leaders and organizations fix burnout without blame, using science, humor, and a refusal to settle for wellness-seminar band-aids.

Book Cait to Speak: https://www.caitdonovan.com/

Connect with Cait

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitdonovanspeaks

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caitdonovanspeaks

This episode is a reminder that there are people fighting for human leadership, inclusivity, responsible AI and more as we move into the future of work.

FRIED Fam,

In June of this year, I got to work with one of my very favorite clients again (repeat business is so fun when it's people you truly enjoy), the National Council of Nonprofits. I had sessions in the afternoon, so I went to the conference in the morning to listen to Diane Yentel speak.

It was the most inspiring thing I had heard in months.

She brought the power of everything each state had accomplished over the past year. Saving nonprofits from losing tax exempt status, protecting people from ICE, keeping libraries afloat when funding was cut - the list was LONG and it took a long time to go through it.

When she was wrapping up, I was full of inspiration and positivity and had two thoughts.

1. I should pitch the NCN to host a podcast for them so that more people get this information and we can boost advocacy and morale at the same time
2. I should have more people that are doing the damn thing on the podcast to remind my listeners that there are leaders and people in power that care

That brings me to this week's guest, Bhushan Sethi, a PwC partner and a man committed to speaking out about inclusion, helping his clients do AI right, and encouraging leaders to center their own self care so they can model well being for others.

In this episode of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, Cait Donovan talks with Bhushan Sethi, a partner at PwC US Consulting with 25 years in workforce strategy and AI led transformation, about why the business case for preventing burnout keeps failing to land. Bhushan co-authored a G20 T20 policy brief linking workforce wellbeing to GDP growth, and he and Cait unpack a startling number from that report, employee burnout is costing the global economy an estimated 322 billion dollars a year in turnover and lost productivity, with chronic stress pushing that figure toward a trillion. They talk about why transformation projects really fail, why organizations still lack a common framework for measuring wellbeing, and why every leader now needs an actual narrative for AI, not just a tool rollout. Bhushan also opens up about growing up with racism in the UK and how a British accent changed the way the world treated him in the US, and Cait connects that to the biology of microaggressions and inflammation. If you work in HR, People and Culture, or you book consultants and speakers on burnout and AI, this conversation is for you.

Key Topics Covered

• Why a 322 billion dollar global price tag on burnout still is not enough to move most organizations to act
• The real reason workplace transformations fail (hint: it was never the technology)
• Why we still do not have a common framework or shared metrics for measuring workplace wellbeing
• Financial wellbeing and sticky inflation as the overlooked piece of the burnout conversation
• A simple three part framework for leading through AI: think like an economist, a scientist, and a humanist
• Why AI anxiety is really a narrative problem, not a tools problem
• The biology of microaggressions: how racism and exclusion show up as measurable inflammation in the body
• Growing up with racism in the UK, and how a British accent changed the way Bhushan was treated in the US
• Why publicly disclosing workplace wellbeing data might be the push organizations actually need
• The coming leadership handoff as boomers and Gen X retire, and why most managers were never trained to lead people

In this episode, we mentioned the following amazing people

Owen Fitzpatrick and his new book, Inner Propaganda. (LINK TO BOOK)

Kristin Scroggin and her work at GenWHY Communications (LINK TO FRIED EPISODE)

Diane Yentel (LINK TO LI PROFILE)

Dr. Natalie Nixon and her Move. Think. Rest book and method (LINK TO FRIED EPISODE)

Suzy Welch and her Becoming You Methodology (LINK TO FRIED EPISODE)

Guest Info

Bhushan Sethi is a partner at PwC US Consulting with over 25 years of experience in workforce strategy and AI led transformation, focused on financial services. He is a World Economic Forum contributor and a G20 T20 task force member, and was honored among the Outstanding 50 Asian Americans in Business in 2025. His insights on the future of work and AI have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, and CNBC. He teaches strategy consulting at NYU Stern and has run 17 marathons.

https://www.youtube.com/@bhushansethi1

https://www.instagram.com/bhushansethi1

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhushansethi

substack.com/@bhushansethi

Host Info

Cait Donovan is the host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast and a keynote speaker who has spent the past several years helping organizations understand burnout not as a personal failing, but as a symptom of mismatch between good people and the systems they work inside. Before this work, she spent 15 years as a licensed acupuncturist, working one-on-one with patients to understand how stress, exhaustion, and chronic overwhelm show up in the body long before they show up on a performance review. That clinical background is what shapes her signature approach, the Blameless Burnout™ Middle Out method, which she brings to leadership teams, HR and People functions, and conference stages through her keynote, Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations.

Her new book, also titled Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations, expands on this work, offering what became, in her own words, a full systems-level diagnostic for stress reduction inside organizations that already have good intentions and are still doing the right things, and are still watching their people burn out anyway.

Book Cait to Speak

Order Mismatch for Your Team

Bulk copies of Mismatch are available for teams, leadership offsites, HR departments, and conference attendees who want to bring this conversation back to their own organizations.

Contact: [email protected]

Connect with Cait

https://instagram.com/caitdonovanspeaks

https://linkedin.com/caitdonovanspeaks

What is emotional intelligence?

Cait breaks down what emotional intelligence actually means, tracing the term back to its 1990 origins and Daniel Goleman's four domain model: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. She digs into Dr. Tasha Eurich's research showing that while 95% of us believe we are self-aware, only 10 to 15% of us actually are, and shares a simple language shift from Dr Eurich that helps close that gap.

Key Topics Covered

• Where emotional intelligence came from and how it evolved
• The four core domains of emotional intelligence and how they build on each other
• Why emotional intelligence is a set of learnable skills, not a personality trait
• The surprising gap between perceived and actual self-awareness
• Internal vs. external self-awareness, and why both matter
• How asking "what?" instead of "why?" builds genuine self-awareness
• Self-management as the pause between emotion and reaction
• Social awareness as reading people, context, and organizational dynamics
• Relationship management as creating connection through nervous system co-regulation

About Your Host

Cait Donovan is a keynote speaker, globally recognized burnout expert, and host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, a top 1% show with over a million downloads. She's the author of The Bouncebackability Factor and is currently writing her second book, Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations (releases Oct 2026). With 3,700+ five-star keynote reviews and a 99% approval rating, Cait helps leaders and organizations fix burnout without blame — using science, humor, and a refusal to settle for wellness-seminar band-aids.

Book Cait to speak: caitdonovan.com

Follow: LinkedIn | Instagram

What if the exhausting voice in your head isn't your inner critic but something closer to an inner dictator, running a full scale propaganda campaign to keep you safe instead of happy? Repeat guest Owen Fitzpatrick, social psychologist and author of the new book Inner Propaganda, joins Cait to unpack how our brains build the beliefs that quietly drive burnout, perfectionism, and people pleasing. It gets personal fast, including a story about something six year old Cait believed about her father's addiction that shaped three decades of hyperindependence.

Key Topics Covered

•      What inner propaganda actually means, and why the brain builds it for survival, not happiness

•      The difference between an inner critic and an inner dictator

•      How childhood beliefs form before we have the words to question them

•      Cait's story about the deal she made with God at age six, and how it built her perfectionism

•      Why fierce independence can actually be one of the most selfish things a person does

•      The three conditions a belief needs before it can change: it has to feel right, fit who you are, and only then make sense

•      Belief leadership, and why data alone never gets a team to buy in

•      The anti-fragile identity Owen uses to turn a rough keynote into fuel instead of a spiral

•      Why you should never evaluate your own performance in the adrenaline crash right after doing something hard

•      What studying propaganda in North Korea and Rwanda taught Owen about the propaganda running inside every one of us

In this episode of FRIED, Cait Donovan welcomes back social psychologist and keynote speaker Owen Fitzpatrick to talk about his new book, Inner Propaganda, and what it reveals about burnout, perfectionism, and leadership. Owen explains why the voice most people call their inner critic is actually closer to an inner dictator, a propaganda machine the brain builds to keep us safe rather than happy. Cait shares a deeply personal story from childhood that explains decades of perfectionism and hyperindependence, and the two dig into why asking for help is generosity, not weakness. The conversation moves through belief leadership, the real reason logical arguments fail to change minds, and the specific conditions a belief needs before someone can actually shift it. Owen also shares how he handles the post keynote spiral every speaker knows, and why waiting to evaluate performance until the adrenaline clears changes everything. This is a conversation for burned out leaders, high achievers, and anyone who has ever wondered why they cannot just think their way out of a feeling. Owen's book Inner Propaganda releases August 4, 2026.

Guest Bio

Owen Fitzpatrick is a social psychologist, keynote speaker, and author of Inner Propaganda, his tenth book. For over two decades he has studied how beliefs form and change in boardrooms and in conflict zones including North Korea and Rwanda. He has delivered keynotes for Google, LinkedIn, Pfizer, and Coca-Cola, was rated the most engaging speaker by 10,000 attendees across two consecutive Forum One events, has spoken in 33 countries, and his books have been translated into 21 languages. Learn more at innerpropaganda.com.

About Your Host

Cait Donovan is a keynote speaker, globally recognized burnout expert, and host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, a top 1% show with over a million downloads. She's the author of The Bouncebackability Factor and is currently writing her second book, Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations (releases Oct 2026). With 3,700+ five-star keynote reviews and a 99% approval rating, Cait helps leaders and organizations fix burnout without blame — using science, humor, and a refusal to settle for wellness-seminar band-aids.

Book Cait to speak: caitdonovan.com

Follow: LinkedIn | Instagram

Creativity expert Dr. Natalie Nixon has spent 25 years studying what activities happen right before your best ideas, and they aren't what you think. They include: staring out a window, folding laundry, taking a walk, admiring a flower. In this episode, she and host Cait Donovan dig into why rigor curdles into rigidity, why that's the exact moment burnout takes hold, and why doing less better might be the most radical productivity advice either of them has ever given. Plus: the neuroscience of daydreaming, the business case for collaboration you actually hate, and the real reason Cait almost didn't take a week off from this podcast.

Key Topics Covered

●     Why staring out the window might be Natalie Nixon's most important work

●     The difference between rigor and rigidity, and why rigidity is where burnout lives

●     MTR (Move Think Rest): Natalie's operating system for sustainable productivity

●     The business case for creativity: collaboration, creative abrasion, and inventive thinking

●     Why fiction reading and 90-second daydream breaks activate the brain's default mode network

●     Interoception, the vagus nerve, and why burned out people miss their own warning signs

●     The generosity-resentment continuum and how rigidity turns commitment into martyrdom

●     Cultivation as a model for work: what farming and hibernating bears teach us about rest

●     Why doing less better is the goal, not doing more, faster, with AI

What if the thing standing between you and your best ideas isn't a lack of discipline, but too much of it? In this episode of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, Cait Donovan talks with Dr. Natalie Nixon, creativity expert, keynote speaker, and author of Move Think Rest, about the moment rigor turns into rigidity, and why that's exactly where burnout lives. Natalie explains her MTR operating system, the neuroscience of daydreaming and the default mode network, and why staring out a window counts as real work. Cait and Natalie make the business case for creativity, from collaboration and creative abrasion to interoception and the vagus nerve, and unpack why so many high performers can't feel their own burnout warning signs until it's too late. Cait also shares a personal story about almost forcing herself through a holiday weekend podcast episode, and what happened in her body the moment she gave herself permission not to. If you have ever confused being rigid with being committed, or wondered why your best ideas show up in the shower and never at your desk, this conversation will change how you think about rest, creativity, and burnout recovery. Keywords: burnout and creativity, rigor vs rigidity, burnout recovery, default mode network, MTR move think rest, burnout signs, creativity ROI.

Guest Info

Dr. Natalie Nixon is the creativity whisperer to the C-suite, a global keynote speaker, and CEO of Figure Eight Thinking. She is the author of Move Think Rest: Redefining Productivity and Our Relationship with Time and The Creativity Leap, and the creator of the Wonder Rigger method, which helps leaders unlock creativity's ROI. Her work draws on more than 25 years across fashion, design, academia, and anthropology. Learn more at figure8thinking.com.

About Your Host

Cait Donovan is a keynote speaker, globally recognized burnout expert, and host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, a top 1% show with over a million downloads. She's the author of The Bouncebackability Factor and is currently writing her second book, Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations (releases Oct 2026). With 3,700+ five-star keynote reviews and a 99% approval rating, Cait helps leaders and organizations fix burnout without blame — using science, humor, and a refusal to settle for wellness-seminar band-aids.

Book Cait to speak: caitdonovan.com

Follow: LinkedIn | Instagram

Cait opens with something rare: a public correction. She has been telling audiences for years that the hippocampus shrinks during burnout. New research says it doesn't. And that changes a lot. In this solo episode, Cait walks through a landmark August 2025 review of 17 MRI studies to give you the most current picture of what burnout actually does to your brain. The result is not what you might expect. It's more specific, more vindicating, and more hopeful.

Key Topics Covered

•      How burnout is neurologically distinct from depression and PTSD

•      What actually happens to the amygdala during burnout (it grows, and women are hit harder)

•      The prefrontal cortex thinning and what researchers call 'neuroflexibility failure'

•      The brain's effort/reward calculation system and why everything feels too expensive to do

•      Rich club networks, real-time communication breakdown, and the sinkhole analogy

•      The insula and the 'emotional dissonance paradox' around empathy in burned out nurses

•      The hippocampus correction: why the memory problems in burnout are functional, not structural

•      What the research says actually heals the burned out brain

Cait Donovan has been telling audiences for years that the hippocampus shrinks during burnout. New research says that's wrong, and in this episode she corrects the record publicly. An August 2025 review of 17 MRI studies and over 1,300 participants found that the burned out brain is neurologically distinct from brains experiencing depression or PTSD. The hippocampus stays mostly intact. What does shrink: the prefrontal cortex (your decision-making and emotional regulation center), the caudate and putamen (your brain's effort-reward system), and the insula (your body's internal translator). What grows: the amygdala (your threat detector), especially in women. Cait breaks down each finding in plain language and what it means for recovery. If you have ever felt like you got dumb during burnout, like everything is too expensive to do, like you should care more than you do, this episode explains the neuroscience behind all of it. And it ends with the most important finding of all: the burned out brain can fully rebuild. Keywords: burnout neuroscience, hippocampus burnout, burned out brain MRI, amygdala burnout, burnout recovery brain, burnout vs depression, burnout science 2025.

Guest Info

Solo episode hosted by Cait Donovan, burnout expert, speaker, and host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast. Cait references research from Dr. Nina (The Anti-Burnout Doctor on Instagram) and an August 2025 peer-reviewed MRI review study.

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About Your Host

Cait Donovan is a keynote speaker, globally recognized burnout expert, and host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, a top 1% show with over a million downloads. She's the author of The Bouncebackability Factor and is currently writing her second book, Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations (releases Oct 2026). With 3,700+ five-star keynote reviews and a 99% approval rating, Cait helps leaders and organizations fix burnout without blame — using science, humor, and a refusal to settle for wellness-seminar band-aids.

Book Cait to speak: caitdonovan.com

Follow: LinkedIn | Instagram

Dr. Zarya Rubin spent twelve years as a neurologist before realizing the career she'd sacrificed everything for no longer matched who she'd become. What she figured out on the way out is exactly what most corporate and nonprofit leaders are missing right now.

In this episode, Cait and Dr. Zarya break down three concepts every HR and people leader needs in their vocabulary:

Moral injury — the gap between what someone signed up to do and what the system actually lets them do. Healthcare workers have a name for it. Your top performers are living it without one.

Compassion fatigue — what happens when over-giving curdles into resentment and gallows humor. Not a healthcare-only problem anyone in a "caring" role at home or work is at risk.

"Compassion fatigue is when over-giving and over-caring stops making you more empathic it starts making you resentful toward the people you're supposed to care for most." Dr. Zarya Rubin

The sunk cost fallacy — why "I've invested too much to leave" keeps your best people stuck instead of either re-engaging or exiting cleanly.

This isn't a healthcare episode wearing a corporate costume. It's a leadership episode that happens to use healthcare as the clearest case study because when the stakes are literally life and death, the mismatch shows up faster and louder. The pattern underneath is the same one sitting in your org chart right now.

Topics Covered

• What is moral injury at work, and how is it different from burnout?
• Why your wellness program can't fix a values mismatch (and what actually can)
• The sunk cost fallacy: why top performers stay in roles that are breaking them
• Signs of compassion fatigue in employees who aren't in "caring professions" and why they're at risk too
• Why women leaders burn out at higher rates, get penalized for slower response times, and are paid less anyway
• How childhood patterns shape adult burnout risk (and why that matters for managers, not just therapists)
• What leaders can actually do about systemic moral injury beyond another wellness seminar

"There's no amount of meditating or yoga or wellness seminars that you can deliver in a workplace that's going to fix moral injury. That is a systemic problem." Dr. Zarya Rubin

Check Out Dr. Zarya Rubin's Outsmart Burnout Podcast

Loved this episode?

Share it with the leader on your team who's been "fine" for a little too long. Then leave a review that's what gets this show in front of more execs and HR leaders who need it.

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About Your Host

Cait Donovan is a keynote speaker, globally recognized burnout expert, and host of FRIED: The Burnout Podcast, a top 1% show with over a million downloads. She's the author of The Bouncebackability Factor and is currently writing her second book, Mismatch: Why Good People Burn Out in Good Organizations. With 3,700+ five-star keynote reviews and a 99% approval rating, Cait helps leaders and organizations fix burnout without blame — using science, humor, and a refusal to settle for wellness-seminar band-aids.

Book Cait to speak: caitdonovan.com

Follow: LinkedIn | Instagram

There's a story from the 1840s that is going to make you furious. And then it's going to make you look at burnout solutions very differently.

Stress spreads like a nasty bug. We have the data. We know what interventions work. We have the results. And we are still not doing what needs to be done.

Let's talk about why.

Want to bring this work into your organization?

Book Cait for a keynote, workshop, or training at caitdonovan.com

Follow Cait:

Instagram

LinkedIn

Burnout does not start with overwork. It starts with miscommunication. Robyn Hatcher, keynote speaker and former soap opera writer for All My Children and One Life to Live, joins Cait to break down why every company has a show bible and what happens when the cast stops reading from the same one. This is an episode about the drama no one is writing on purpose and the silence that is writing it for them.

Key Topics Covered

• The show bible as an organizational framework for understanding culture, values, and expectations
• How workplace drama is written by silence, assumptions, and miscommunication rather than malice
• The difference between breakdown writers (leadership) and script writers (employees) and why they need to work in tandem
• Why psychological safety alone cannot fix communication breakdowns rooted in personal history
• Robyn's LUVE framework for navigating hard conversations without sounding aggressive
• The evil twin phenomenon: how burnout and overwhelm change how we show up and communicate
• What it means to be your own editor at work and when to ask for direction
• Why hinting is not the same as speaking up, and how gossip becomes the substitute for direct communication

Former soap opera writer and keynote speaker Robyn Hatcher joins Cait on FRIED to talk about something most companies do not realize they have: a show bible. Every organization runs on a script, complete with characters, scenes, and unspoken rules about how the show is supposed to go. When leadership rewrites the show bible without telling anyone, chaos follows. When employees play background characters instead of owning their roles, drama fills the silence.

Robyn and Cait dig into the mechanics of workplace communication, why silence creates drama faster than conflict does, and how most people mistake hinting for speaking up. Robyn shares her LUVE framework for having hard conversations without coming across as aggressive, and they get into the evil twin phenomenon: what happens to our communication when we are burned out, overwhelmed, or operating from unexamined triggers.

Whether you lead a team or work within one, this episode gives you a new lens for understanding the drama around you and your own part in writing it. No tips list. No five signs. Just a real conversation about what is actually going on.

Connect with Cait:

Cait Donovan is a keynote speaker, author, and host of FRIED. The Burnout Podcast. She helps organizations uncover the mismatches that drive burnout, before they cost them their people.

Through keynotes, workshops, and leadership programs, Cait teaches leaders and teams how to use burnout as data instead of treating it as a personal weakness. Blending research, biology, and practical tools, she helps organizations build cultures where people can perform at a high level without burning out in the process.

To bring Cait to your organization or event, book an inquiry call here: https://bit.ly/bookcait

Learn more about Cait’s speaking work: https://www.caitdonovan.com/speaking

Short on time? Watch this 3-min video: https://bit.ly/caitdreel2025

Burnout searches just hit 24.8 million per month, and searches for burnout recovery grew 1,000 percent year over year (for those not great at math, that's 10x more searches for burnout recovery this year as compared to last year). Cait digs into a recent Inc. magazine article by Lucia Auerbach to unpack what those numbers really mean and why the conversation is far from over. Spoiler: Gen Z is not the problem, and the fix is not a wellness app.

Key Topics Covered

•      The Inc. magazine data: 24.8 million monthly burnout searches and what 1,000% growth in burnout recovery searches tells us

•      Gen Z's 'It's PR, not the ER' mentality and the economic logic behind it

•      Why the real crisis isn't work-life balance, it's the loss of meaningful work

•      Simon Sinek's 'why' and what happens when companies forget theirs

•      Career breaks, sabbaticals, and why Boeing's return-to-work program matters

•      What leaders actually need to do now as this generation fills the workforce

•      Why FRIED is the largest burnout recovery resource in the world and why you should share this episode

Burnout isn't going away. Online mentions jumped 65% and burnout recovery searches grew 1,000% year over year, hitting nearly 25 million monthly searches. In this solo episode, Cait Donovan breaks down a viral Inc. magazine article on Gen Z's evolving relationship with work and what it means for leaders trying to build cultures people actually want to stay in. From the 'it's PR not the ER' mentality spreading through workplaces to the normalization of career breaks and sabbaticals, this episode covers what's really driving disengagement and what organizations need to prioritize to get ahead of it. If you're a leader wondering why your people seem checked out, this one is required listening. FRIED: The Burnout Podcast is the largest burnout recovery resource in the world. Subscribe, review, and share with someone who needs it.