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The exhaustion that rest can’t reach Maya spent over a decade at a healthtech company. She worked her way up from IC to people manager, running her own team, and she was thriving on the director track. Then she stepped back to deal with a health issue. Now she’s a fractional product leader three days a week for a startup while job-hunting to try and return to enterprise work. That health situation has since resolved. At three days a week, this is the lightest workload she’s had in many, many years. Yet she’s been struggling with feeling burnt out. The most common advice I see for product leaders facing burnout is to rest. Take PTO. Meditate. Lighten the calendar. When rest doesn’t work, the next piece of advice is to quit and find a different company. In coaching, I’ve watched enough people follow both playbooks to know they don’t always fix the problem. Maya’s story can help show why. She came to me for coaching after reading a post of mine sharing my experiences with how rest doesn’t always help. That resonated. She came to me to figure out what was going on under the surface. On our call, she talked about the interview grind. She’d tried not doing too much prep, then tried a lot of rehearsal. No matter what she did, she’d go into the room and bomb it. The offers weren’t coming in. She ran a hand over her face as she said: “That’s how I feel with burnout, that I’m doing so many things but nothing is ticking or landing.” She blamed the burnout for blocking her ability to be successful in interviews. With all these job-hunt failures, a different question surfaced in her mind: was she actually not as good a product leader as she thought? She had recently switched to applying to lower-tier roles — less pay, less responsibility — because she thought that was the market signal. But she still wasn’t seeing success. She knew she was burnt out. What she didn’t know was what kind, or whether other product leaders were going through it, or what she was supposed to do about it. Something beyond needing some more time off was going on here, so we dug in. Maya on autopilot When you listen to Maya describe her prior role, you can hear the joy in her voice. In her words, she could “get into the weeds yet really strategize.” Leaving a job she loves to deal with a health issue wasn’t an easy choice. And as things stabilized, she didn’t want her skills to go stale. This fractional role seemed like a perfect fit. Not too time-intensive, interesting enough. A startup, so new skills to be gained there. When talking with me, she admitted that she was on autopilot in her fractional role. “I’m holding back over there. I’d rather prioritize my energy on the job hunt.” She added, almost surprised to hear herself, that this was the first time she’d actually said it out loud. The startup is on her resume. The startup is what she’s doing with her days. And by her own account, she’s giving less than her full effort. I took this moment to mirror her words back to her: “You have a belief about yourself that you are a high performing person. I heard it all through your story. And so here you are coasting through this startup, and that doesn’t align to how you see yourself. That’s the gap.” She took a deep breath before she replied. “Exactly. There’s absolute truth to it because I know I’m not presenting the ideals or the work values that I have.” She’s not just burned out from the misalignment at the startup.
She’s also letting the bad interview rounds shape her self-perception. The gap between who she believes herself to be and the evidence she’s collecting about herself is widening from both sides at the same time. She’s going into each interview feeling like a liar, presenting a version of herself she’s not currently living up to. That’s hard to sustain. Of course she’s exhausted. Naming it was the pivot for Maya. Once she could see the gap between how she saw herself and what she was actually bringing to work, she had somewhere to aim. Not really about workload Some burnout does come from doing too much. Rest fixes it, and if that’s what you have, take the rest. But over and over in coaching I’ve seen another version of this. Someone comes back from PTO, from a sabbatical, from cutting their hours, and the exhaustion follows them right back into the office. That’s the version I’ve been describing with Maya. What’s underneath isn’t workload. It’s a mismatch between who you are and what your current role or workplace is actually asking of you. Sometimes the source is the environment: a role that doesn’t use what you’re best at, an org that keeps your real work off your calendar, a team dynamic that keeps you performing a version of yourself you don’t recognize. Sometimes it’s you: how you’re engaging with the work, what you’re telling yourself about it, the parts of yourself you’ve been holding back. Usually it’s some of each. Either way, the mismatch shows up as a gap between the version of yourself you thought you’d be at work and the version that’s actually showing up. You can be doing very little and be burnt out. You can be doing a lot and not be. The variable is the size of that mismatch. When you’re living out of alignment, you read everything as more evidence: the slow startup, the failed interview, the operating meeting that isn’t the work you wanted to be doing. The gap feeds itself. The longer it goes, the bigger the evidence pile against the version of yourself you want to be. That’s part of why it’s so hard to rest your way out of. Maya’s case shows the mechanism. She’s letting the interview pipeline define her view of herself. Every “no” becomes more proof that she’s not who she thought she was. And rest doesn’t touch this. Take the break, come back, and you land in the same patterns that made the gap in the first place. Maya’s case is one version.