Burnout to Balance

In today's demanding, fast-paced, pressure-filled workplace, workloads are heavy, management expectations are sky-high, and "fires" pop up weekly. Employee burnout has become a significant concern, draining productivity and engagement.

Kelsey Buckholtz, Director of Communications Strategy at Local Wisdom and author of Strong Calm Confident You, shares her first-hand experience with burnout, digs into the underlying factors that drain your energy, and offers a route back to reclaiming your time and wellbeing.

She starts where she started: a decade at a Fortune 50 pharmaceutical company, beginning as an intern who took on every project and built a reputation for getting things done. Nobody tells you that once you have the job you are allowed to say no. That pattern ended with crying on the drive home several nights a week, then a diagnosis, then the work of recovery.

The session names the two causes most often underneath the overwhelm — perfectionism and people-pleasing — and gives attendees a way to measure their own. Then three moves in order: short-term strategies to survive the current workload, the deeper work on what is actually driving it, and the prevention measures that keep it from returning.

Attendees leave having built their own self-care menu and committed to three boundaries.