Burnout Proof Leadership: Shift Your Identity, Develop New Skills & Leverage Workplace Tensions to Unlock your Next Level · Dr. Tracy Christopherson and Michelle Troseth

Two New Leadership Skills to Burnout-Proof Your Life with Charlène Gisèle

January 14, 2026·36 min·3 clips

Charlène Gisèle watched her father have a stroke in the hospital, realizing his heart attack was burnout-driven and that she was burnt out too.

1. Burnout Proof Leadership hosts Charlène Gisèle, a former big-law litigator turned clinical hypnotherapist and health psychologist specializing in burnout prevention for lawyers and corporate leaders. 2. Hosts Michelle and Tracy interview Charlène; she identifies herself as a former litigator who now runs a practice combining hypnotherapy, health coaching, and somatic intelligence for high performers. 3. The episode's core thesis is that work addiction operates by the same psychological mechanisms as substance addiction, and that recovery requires the same structural interventions. 4. Charlène reports she was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and clinical insomnia — sleeping under three hours a night cumulatively over three years — but immediately reframed her insomnia as extra billing time at the law firm. 5. Her marriage deteriorated because she was consistently absent, doing all-nighters until 3am; her ex-husband, described as seeking a 'traditional wife,' could not understand her work culture, and the marriage ended in divorce. 6. Her reaction to the divorce — 'no one's waiting anymore at home, so I have more time to work' — is presented as a self-described example of addiction logic: the loss of one consequence became a resource for more of the addictive behavior. 7. The moment she recognized her burnout was watching her father suffer a stroke in an ICU after he had been admitted for a burnout-driven heart attack; she had stayed at work all week after hearing the news, flying home only on Friday when told he would not survive the night. 8. She defines work addiction using the structural definition of addiction: 'resourcing to a substance, a thing, or a habit to escape, numb, soothe, or alleviate a feeling we don't want to feel,' with the avoided emotions typically being fear, sadness, hurt, and anger. 9. She draws on her professional training in addiction to argue that work provides the same neurochemical rewards as stimulant drugs — dopamine, adrenaline, social status — while progressively narrowing the addict's life. 10. Her own recovery involved quitting her job, leaving her flat and all her clothes, and buying a one-way ticket to India and Bali, spending three months in an ashram practicing meditation and silence — which she now recognizes as a 'rehab of sort.' 11. She distinguishes her recovery from abandoning ambition: she always intended to return to corporate work, and her goal was to become the leader she wanted to be 'minus the burnout.' 12. She introduces 'sober work' as work that does not bleed into other commitments: her personal measure is never canceling a date night for a client promise made the same afternoon, and planning her workload proactively rather than overpromising. 13. Relapse signs she identifies include dishonesty — lies of omission to family about working hours — and substitution addiction, such as a former client who resolved overwork but began compulsive eating at hotel buffets on holiday. 14. She recommends that high performers ask trusted friends for early warning signs, because loved ones can see the pattern before the person inside it can. 15. On somatic intelligence, she argues the body has built-in physiological breaks — bathroom breaks, meals, sleep — that high performers routinely suppress, and that suppressing all of them simultaneously causes systemic inflammation, digestive disorders including GERD and IBS, and in women, infertility. 16. She leads the hosts through a one-minute breathing exercise: inhale for two counts, exhale for four, to activate the parasympathetic nervous system; she recommends this between back-to-back calls. 17. Her French wellness habit recommendation is the 90-minute lunch break, illustrated by a Paris meeting with a partner who scheduled what she expected to be a 30-minute meal as a 90-minute, two-course, sit-down lunch with coffee. 18. The interview style is personal and confessional; Charlène speaks from first-person experience throughout and uses direct challenge language toward listeners ('you're choosing to be too busy'). 19. Best suited for high-performing professionals in law, finance, or corporate leadership who recognize overwork patterns in themselves or their teams. 20. Listeners seeking general wellness content without a corporate or high-performance professional frame may find the specificity of the big-law and billable-hours context narrow.

As heard by us

A calm, useful conversation about burnout, honesty, and the cost of overworking.

Charlene Giselle talks about burnout in a way that stays practical without flattening it. The conversation moves from overwork to honesty, boundaries, and the pressure high performers carry, and it lands best when sober work and somatic intelligence are treated as tools for…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want burnout advice that starts with your body, not a slogan.

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