The Missing Piece in Burnout Prevention for Women
Your Values Are Quietly Killing You
And you probably don't even know it.
Have you ever felt physically ill right before a workday starts? Do you find yourself justifying decisions at home that you'd never actually agree with in private?
Is there something happening in your life right now (maybe at work, maybe in a relationship, maybe just a project you're committed to) that makes you feel like you're slowly disappearing?
Most of us treat burnout like a physical problem. We optimize sleep. We eat better. We add more yoga classes to the calendar. We do all the "right" things.
And none of it fixes it.
Because the thing destroying your energy isn't missing from your body. It's missing from your foundation.
(01:00) Meet the Woman Who Stopped Burning Out by Accident
Bianca Best spent decades reaching for everything. The business. The title. The expanded life. The big dreams.
And she kept slamming into walls.
Not because she was weak. Not because she needed better time management. But because she was compromising something so fundamental that her nervous system was screaming every single day.
She's built a globally recognized speaking and strategy career working with companies like Google, Amazon, Deloitte, and Unilever. She's a published author who just released her new book: Big Impact Without Burnout, endorsed by Arianna Huffington.
But her real expertise? Learning how to sustain an ambitious life without sacrificing the person living it.
And it starts with paying attention to what you're ignoring.
(08:14) What Most People Get Wrong About Burnout
Bianca tried everything.
She started with the obvious:
Better diet
More sleep
Regular exercise
All the standard wellness plays
It helped. Not enough.
Then she tried the mental approach:
Daily journaling
Meditation practice
Mindfulness training
Better. Something was still missing.
The breakthrough came when she stopped looking at what was wrong with her body and started looking at what was wrong with her choices.
She discovered the emotional realm was where the real damage lived. When you're compromising on something that actually matters to you (your values, your beliefs, how you want to be treated), your nervous system registers it as permanent stress.
You compromise on how a team should work. On what you stand for. On the kind of leader you want to be. On what integrity means to you.
Each time, there's a little rumble. A niggle. An irritation you can't quite explain.
Those niggles add up. And no vitamin or meditation app fixes systemic stress born from emotional misalignment.
(13:27) The Moment She Realized She Had Agency
Walking to her office one morning, Bianca noticed something physical happening in her body. She was bracing. Her muscles tightened. Her breath became shallow.
She didn't want to go in.
The thought of a day with those people, in that environment, with values that didn't match hers, was making her physically smaller. She could feel herself contracting.
Her first instinct was to compensate. Work harder. Prove more value. Put in longer hours. Show them what she was capable of.
But that strategy backfired. The problem wasn't her performance. It was the misalignment. You cannot outwork fundamental misalignment.
She even cut her hair trying to fit in. Thought maybe if she presented differently, optimized her external appearance, the internal conflict wouldn't matter anymore.
Then something shifted. She realized the disempowerment wasn't happening to her. She was creating it.
She asked herself a simple question: What environment do I actually want to work in? And then she went and found it.
That's not impulsive quitting. That's becoming conscious of your own agency.
(22:08) The Framework That Changes Everything
Most burnout advice starts with the wrong question. It asks: how can I be more productive?
Bianca asks something different: what actually energizes me?
Because here's what she found: if you follow what genuinely energizes you (which almost always aligns with your values), and you understand your personal rhythms for when you need restoration, everything else gets easier. The burnout concerns fade. The productivity concerns resolve.
You're not trying to be more efficient. You're making sure the life you're actually living feeds you instead of draining you.
The 80-20 Rule:
80% of your time needs to be stuff that invigorates you. Learning. Autonomy. Flow. Alignment with your values.
20% can be the boring administrative stuff. The necessary but uninspiring tasks.
That ratio is what sustains.
When you're spending 80% of your day in misery, no productivity hack compensates. The fix isn't squeezing more output. It's spending your time differently.
If your current role is the opposite (20% good, 80% draining), then something needs to change. Not eventually. Now.
(26:24) Why the Data Looks Different for Women
The Reality: Women experience burnout at significantly higher rates than men. This isn't about resilience or stress management skills. It's about the actual load.
The Hidden Second Job
Women carry approximately 68% of emotional and domestic labor at home. You're already depleted before you walk into work.
The Perfectionism Trap
Add social media showing a version of womanhood where everyone's a high-achiever doing it all flawlessly. Add the technological explosion that means work doesn't end, it just moves to your phone at 9 PM.
The Pandemic Acceleration
Before COVID, Europe worked about 8 hours a day. Now? 11 hours is the new standard. We never pulled back.
The Boundary Collapse
Work happens during kid bedtime. You're on calls while cooking dinner. Your laptop stays open during family meals. There's no restoration. No softness. Just accumulation.
The cost compounds in your nervous system every single day, and nobody's naming it as the crisis it is.
The Real Work Starts Here
You now know the emotional realm is where burnout lives. You understand the 80-20 ratio. You see how misalignment shows up in your body before it shows up in your burnout.
But knowing it and living it are two different things.
In the full episode, Bianca walks through the specific questions to ask yourself before accepting a role. She shares the exact framework she uses to identify which values are being compromised (sometimes so subtly you don't even realize). And she reveals how to maintain integrity when the pressure to compromise is coming from every direction.
This is where you get the actual infrastructure. Not just the awareness, but the actionable steps to stop choosing misalignment.
Hywel goes deeper in the full conversation on navigating cynicism across different corporate cultures and what generational shifts mean for who gets permission to challenge decisions. If you're ready to weaponize your skepticism properly instead of apologizing for it, that's where you'll find the real framework.
Connect with Bianca: BiancaBest.com | LinkedIn | Big Impact Without Burnout Book
Connect with Traci here: https://linktr.ee/HRTraci