The Catherine Plano Podcast

Catherine Plano
  • 4.8 (19)
  • Self-Improvement
  • Updated Weekly

Your ultimate resource for expanding your mind and accessing more of your brain, while experiencing unparalleled ‘aha’ moments with guaranteed radical shifts to your learning and growth. Catherine’s goal is to help you become the very best version of yourself - to live an extraordinary life by reaching your fullest potential, with self-coaching strategies to boost your confidence, make better decisions, create new habits, kickstart your motivation, get extraordinary results and build lasting change for a meaningful life that you will absolutely love! Get inspired and energised with your weekly dose of new ideas and insights.

  1. 6d ago

    Oxford Neuroscientist: Your Brain Is Not Shrinking with Dr Sarah McKay

    Dr Sarah McKay will tell you that the most common question she hears from women is also the least useful one. What is wrong with my brain? She is an Oxford-educated neuroscientist, founder of Think Brain and The Neuroscience Academy, presenter on ABC Catalyst and the author of The Women’s Brain Book, Baby Brain and Brain Health For Dummies. She has been a neuroscientist since 1993, when she fell in love with the subject in a first year undergraduate lecture, and she has spent the years since translating brain research into something people can actually use. So when Catherine raised the widely repeated idea that the ageing brain shrinks, Sarah did not soften her answer. No, your brain is not shrinking. Some menopause research actually shows grey matter volume increasing across the transition. Other research shows very little change beyond what ageing alone would explain. The volume loss we do see, through adolescence and first pregnancy, is a streamlining and refinement of connections rather than a decline. Sarah is careful to point out that a big part of what she tries to do is counter the assumption that the brain is inherently broken, or inevitably will be. She would rather learn something new about it than berate herself for not knowing it sooner. A map, not a diagnosis What Sarah offers instead is the most useful thing in the conversation, and it asks nobody to become a neuroscientist. Picture your brain inside your body, inside your world, and ask what information it is receiving and making meaning of. That information arrives from three directions. Bottom up is the body talking to the brain: sleep, hormones, stress physiology, inflammation, movement, nutrition, pain and energy. Outside in is the world shaping the brain: relationships, caregiving, work, culture, safety, expectations, social connection and cognitive load. Top down is the mind shaping experience: attention, beliefs, predictions, identity, self-talk and what we think our symptoms mean. Across puberty, cycles, pregnancy, postpartum, perimenopause, menopause and ageing, all three are always at work. Which is why Sarah swaps the question. Not what is wrong with my brain, but what is my brain responding to, and which system needs support first? Brain fog is a systems puzzle Applied to brain fog, the map changes everything. Oestrogen helps set the thermostat in your brain, and as it shifts the thermoregulatory zone narrows, so a small rise in body temperature gets read as an emergency. If that happens overnight, sleep architecture fractures. Waking once at 3am is not great. Waking for weeks or months on end is different. As Sarah puts it, it does not take long until you are lying there thinking, I am always awake, and then you will find something to worry about. Tired but wired slides into hypervigilance, and hypervigilance slides into anxiousness, which disrupts sleep further. Alongside that, oestrogen is one regulator of how neurons take up glucose to make energy, so thinking can feel slower and more effortful. Brain networks also become less specialised with age, so reaching a solution takes a little more mental labour. None of it is decline. All of it is a system under load. The input almost nobody counts Then there is the piece that surprised Catherine most. Research shows that a phone face down on the table still drains you, because the effort of not looking at it consumes working memory. Sarah’s own view is that mobile phones have reached a level of salience close to that of a newborn baby. Her solution is refreshingly physical: a small device on her fridge that blocks apps until she walks over and taps her phone against it. Friction, deliberately restored. Why you cannot think your way out Sarah’s most contrarian point is worth sitting with. Knowing how the brain changes does not mean you can think your way into changing it. Using your thoughts to change your thoughts, she says, is the hard way around, and often the road to rumination. Change an input instead. Move your body into a different environment, the way she did in Antarctica, where her anxiety simply faded because life became linear. Sarah leaves the audience with three golden nuggets: What is draining my brain this week? What is nourishing my brain this week? What is one thing I can change? Not a full renovation. One thing. Get it out of your head and onto pen and paper, and Sarah guarantees you will come up with a far more strategic plan, and it will change your brain. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. Find Out More About Dr Sarah McKay Website: https://www.drsarahmckay.com Instagram: @drsarahmckay Facebook: Your Brain Health

    Oxford Neuroscientist: Your Brain Is Not Shrinking with Dr Sarah McKay

  2. Jul 28

    You Were Not Made to Fit In, You Were Made to Belong

    Have you ever made a decision that, on reflection, made no sense? Stayed in a job you hated, a relationship that was wrong, a group that did not value you? And wondered why you could not just leave? The answer is not weakness. The answer is biology. We are wired to belong. Not as a preference, not as a personality trait, but as a survival imperative. And when that wiring is running quietly in the background, it shapes far more of our lives than we realise. In this Moment of Awe, we explore what the science reveals about belonging, why the pull to fit in is so powerful, and three ways to begin cultivating the kind of belonging that fills you rather than depletes you. The Hunger You Did Not Choose For most of human history, being cast out of your group meant death. Your nervous system has not forgotten that. It still treats rejection and exclusion as a physical threat, and it responds accordingly. This is not poetic language. Neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman, in his research at UCLA, found that the brain processes social rejection in the same region it processes physical pain. Being left out hurts, literally, in the same way a broken bone does. Psychologist Roy Baumeister found something similar from a different angle: the need to belong is one of the most fundamental human motivations, operating across cultures, ages and contexts. When that need goes unmet, people will go to extraordinary lengths to satisfy it, often at significant cost to themselves. I call this belonging hunger. It is the background drive that makes you shrink yourself to fit in. It keeps you in rooms that diminish you, because being in the room feels safer than being outside it. It makes you agree when you disagree, perform when you are exhausted, and betray your own values to avoid the terror of exclusion. And most people have no idea it is happening. That is what makes it so powerful. Belonging hunger does not announce itself. It simply distorts everything quietly: your choices, your relationships, the way you see yourself. Counterfeit Belonging and the Real Thing Here is the distinction that changes everything. Counterfeit belonging requires you to hide parts of yourself in order to be accepted. It feels like belonging from the outside. It looks like belonging on paper. But there is always a cost, and you pay it in the quiet exhaustion of maintaining a version of yourself that is not quite true. Genuine belonging is what happens when you are accepted because of who you actually are, not in spite of it. Brené Brown puts it perfectly: fitting in is the opposite of belonging. Fitting in requires you to change yourself. Belonging requires you to be yourself. Three Ways to Cultivate Genuine Belonging This is not a single dramatic act. It happens in small, honest moments. Here is where to begin: Audit where you currently belong. Look at the groups, relationships and environments in your life and ask honestly: do I feel safe to be myself here? If the answer is no, that is not belonging. That is performance. And performance is exhausting. Risk being seen in one relationship. Genuine belonging begins with one moment of authentic self-disclosure. Not a dramatic revelation, simply a real opinion, a real feeling, a real admission. Then notice what happens. The people who respond with warmth to your authenticity are the ones worth investing in. Build your belonging from the inside out. The most durable sense of belonging comes not from finding the right group, but from belonging to yourself first. When you are deeply connected to your own values, your own truth, your own sense of who you are, you carry belonging with you. No one can grant it, and no one can take it away. The Distance You Have Been Feeling So here is the invitation. What if the loneliness you have been feeling is not about the people around you, but about the distance between who you are with them and who you actually are? What if genuine belonging, the kind that actually fills you rather than depletes you, is available to you right now? Not when you find the right people or the right place, but when you stop hiding the person you already are. You were not made to fit in. You were made to belong. And belonging begins the moment you stop asking permission to be yourself. Because the more human we are with each other, the more we all rise. You can watch the video of this episode on YouTube. Newsletter: Catherine Plano for transformation. Instagram: @catherineplano for inspiration.

    You Were Not Made to Fit In, You Were Made to Belong

  3. Jul 21

    Fearless Isn't the Game, Brave Is (How to Fear Your Fear Less) with Judi Holler

    Judi Holler will happily tell you she is one of the biggest fraidy cats you will ever meet. She is afraid of all the things. She is also a keynote speaker, USA TODAY bestselling author of Fear Is My Homeboy and a self-described professional experimenter who has spent nearly twenty years treating fear as her most important advisor. That contradiction is precisely the point of this conversation, because as Judi sees it, the goal was never fearless. The goal is brave. Her courage was built in unlikely places. Working in corporate America by day, Judi spent her nights in the dark, dingy little theatres of Chicago’s improv scene, eventually training at the legendary Second City. She calls improv her fear yoga. With no script and no safety net, those basement stages taught her how to make mistakes, recover, listen and act before she felt ready. Then she started smuggling those lessons into the office: speaking up first in meetings, sitting in the front row, going for the promotion, asking for the raise. Small brave moves that walked new people and opportunities into her life, until the morning her boss sat her down over breakfast and told her to choose between her corporate career and her growing speaking work. She set down her fork and knife, looked at him and said, I don’t choose you. I’m going to choose me on this one. I quit. A decade later, she has never looked back. Fearless is for five-year-olds and sociopaths Judi takes issue with the word fearless, plastered as it is across t-shirts, bumper stickers and tattoos. If you were truly fearless, she points out, you would never see a doctor, you would eat poisonous food on purpose, you would punch a shark in the face. Borrowing a line from Elizabeth Gilbert, she reminds us that the only genuinely fearless people are five-year-olds and sociopaths. Fear is wisdom. The work is not to eliminate it but to fear your fear less, and bravery, like confidence and creativity, is a muscle built through daily experimentation. Your brain versus your soul At the heart of Judi’s methodology sits a tension we all live with: our brains are louder, faster and more practised than our souls. The brain has one job, safety, and it can only reference past data, endlessly auditing your life and pulling you back towards the familiar. But life does not follow old data. Life is improv. There is no script. The soul is your capacity to trust yourself and make decisions inside uncertainty, and Judi is quick to note this is no longer woo. She points to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Work research, where skills like resilience, creative thinking, motivation and self-awareness now top the list of what the world needs, and every one of them lives in the soul. Reclaim, don’t reinvent When Judi felt creatively caged five years ago, she resisted the urge to tear it all down. Reinvention, she says, whispers that what you have built is not good enough. Reclamation says the opposite: I love what you have made here, and I want to see more. Through a confrontational journey of self-discovery, she realised nothing was ever wrong with her. She had simply been painting the canvas of her life with everybody else’s brush. Out of that season came the HOLLER Method, a personal operating system for courage built letter by letter from her own surname, along with nightly rituals like her 9.30pm glitch list, where she captures the ideas her brain would rather she forgot. Judi leaves the audience with three golden nuggets: Trust it all. Every twist, delay and detour is preparing you for what comes next. Experiment with your fear. Every day. On purpose. Small brave moves compound into a courageous life. Honour the graveyard rule. As Les Brown says, the graveyard is the richest place on earth, full of dreams that were never acted on. Do not let yours be buried there. It is a funny, honest and deeply practical conversation about courage, self-trust and the experiments that bring us back to ourselves. Whatever you have been waiting to do, take the first step. Go scared. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. Find Out More About Judi Holler Website: https://judiholler.com Instagram: @judiholler Facebook: Judi Holler Fan Page YouTube: @JudiHoller

    Fearless Isn't the Game, Brave Is (How to Fear Your Fear Less) with Judi Holler

  4. Jul 14

    This Generation Does Not Have a Short Attention Span with Heather Parady

    Heather Parady never set out to build a brand. Growing up in the Southern Christian Bible Belt of the USA, she wanted one thing from the time she was a little girl: full-time ministry. That was what you did if you loved the Lord. But a series of events left her in an empty, dark place, and it was there, through podcasts and YouTube channels she never knew existed, that she stumbled into the world of mindset and personal development. The idea that changed everything was simple: the cards you were given are not the cards you have to end up with. What began as a sense of indebtedness, a need to pass on what she was learning, has evolved into a body of work helping unconventional leaders build an online presence that reaches hearts and souls. A former therapist, Heather now builds narrative strategies for people who want their message to genuinely connect. Her philosophy is refreshingly countercultural: real impact goes deep before it ever goes wide, and when your message truly resonates, you don’t have to worry about reach. It follows naturally. Tools are not fuel Much of the conversation centres on the trap most creators fall into. We’re taught the formula: open with a hook, deliver three points, close the loop. Heather doesn’t dismiss any of it. They’re tools in your tool belt. But tools are not fuel. We’ve all watched a video that was formatted beautifully and still felt like ninety wasted seconds, because there was no soul or heart in it. The fuel, she explains, is being sold on your message with deep conviction, and that’s the harder work, because conviction drags every insecurity to the surface. Who am I to say this? Without that foundation, no hook on earth will make your message land. She also offers a distinction every creator needs to sit with: are you sharing to serve your audience, or are you using your audience to feel validated? One is service. The other is an unhealed wound wearing the costume of authenticity. Vulnerability is not weakness Heather is quick to dismantle what online culture has done to the word vulnerable. It doesn’t mean airing your dirty laundry or crying on Instagram every afternoon. It isn’t handing strangers what belongs to your therapist, your spouse, your journal and the Lord. Vulnerability is speaking into the wound and sharing the strength that came from it, showing the parts of your story you have overcome and the resolve it took. That requires doing your inner work first, and Heather is open about the fact that it never ends. She was in therapy the day before this recording and will be there again next week. It’s a continuum, not a destination. That inner work is also the answer to the fear of visibility. We say we want to be seen, yet at our core many of us are terrified of it. When the identity-level work has been done, when you know who you are and what you were put on this earth to do, criticism from a stranger online can be met with empathy without shaking you in your bones. Heather knows this personally. The story that took her years to tell publicly, her break from organised religion, cost her relationships with family and people she grew up with. It still stings. It no longer shakes her. Heather leaves the audience with three golden nuggets: This generation does not have a short attention span. We binge entire series in a weekend. What’s missing is depth, so build your message on resonance and conviction, not hooks and formulas. The more robotic and manufactured the digital world becomes, the more light will shine on people pointing to truth and wholeness. Your humanity is your advantage. The thing we think is the thing is not the thing. The real work behind an elevated message is your own deep internal work, so prioritise your soul over the internet. It is an honest, fiery conversation about conviction, identity and why your message matters more than your metrics. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. Find Out More About Heather Parady Website: https://www.heatherparady.com Instagram: @heatherparady Facebook: Unconventional Leaders Podcast YouTube: @HeatherParady

    This Generation Does Not Have a Short Attention Span with Heather Parady

  5. Jul 7

    The Identity Gap: The Quiet Anxiety of Not Being Who You Really Are

    Have you ever felt a quiet unease you couldn’t quite name? Your life looks fine, maybe even good. Nothing is technically wrong. And yet something follows you, a sense that the person you present to the world and the person you actually are, are not quite the same. That distance has a name. I call it the identity gap. And it is one of the most common, least talked about sources of suffering I see in the work that I do. In this Moment of Awe, we explore where this gap comes from, why it was never a character flaw, and three practical ways to begin closing it. The Space Between Two Selves Most of us were shaped by other people’s ideas of who we should be. Our parents, our culture, religion, school, the version of success handed to us before we were old enough to choose our own. For a long time, we live inside that shape. We perform it so well that we forget it is a performance. Until we don’t. Until something shifts, and the quiet anxiety becomes impossible to ignore. The identity gap is the distance between who you were conditioned to be and who you actually are. It is the space between the self you show the world and the self that surfaces when you are completely alone. Psychologist Carl Rogers called this the gap between the real self and the ideal self, and when that gap is wide, anxiety lives right in between. Not loud, dramatic anxiety. Quiet anxiety. The kind that shows up as a low hum of dissatisfaction. Decisions that look good on paper but feel wrong in the body. Relationships where you feel unseen, not because the other person is failing, but because you have never shown them who you actually are. A career that made sense at 25 and feels like a cage at 40. It Was Never a Flaw. It Was Survival. Here is what is important to understand. The gap is not a character flaw. It is the result of adaptation. You became who you needed to become in order to survive in your environment, to be loved, to belong. That was intelligent. That was necessary. But you are no longer that child, and the shape you adapted into may no longer fit the person you are growing into. When you can see the gap this way, something softens. You stop blaming yourself for the distance and start getting curious about crossing it. Three Ways to Begin Closing the Gap Closing the identity gap is not a single dramatic act. It happens in small, honest moments. Here is where to begin: Get curious about where you feel most like yourself. Not where you perform best, not where you are most productive or most admired. Where do you feel most at ease in your own skin? That feeling is data. Follow it. Notice the moments of resentment. Resentment is almost always a signal that something you are doing is out of alignment with who you actually are. It is not a flaw, it is a compass. Ask yourself: what am I doing that does not feel like mine? Practise small acts of authentic expression. You do not close the identity gap in a single conversation. You close it in tiny daily choices. Sharing a real opinion. Saying no to something that is not yours. Letting someone see you, even slightly, as you actually are. A Signal, Not a Problem So here is the invitation. What if the anxiety you have been trying to manage is not a problem to solve, but a signal to follow? What if the version of you that feels most real, most alive, most like home is not something you have to build from scratch, but something you have to return to? The gap is not the truth of who you are. It is simply the distance between where you are and where you belong. And every step towards your truth closes it a little more. Because the more human we are with each other, the more we all rise. You can watch the video of this episode on YouTube. Newsletter: https://catherineplano.com for transformation. Instagram: @catherineplano for inspiration.

    The Identity Gap: The Quiet Anxiety of Not Being Who You Really Are

  6. Jun 30

    The Day She Tore Up Her Scripts And Chose To Live with Dana Grant

    Dana Grant has built her work around helping people align with universal principles, but she is the first to tell you she did not start there. She was the woman setting unbreakable corporate sales records while, behind the curtain, she was quietly dying. Saturated with enough medication to, in her words, kill an elephant, living with irretractable migraines and a body breaking down, she reached a moment in her kitchen where she tore up her prescriptions with no solution and no idea what came next. Weeks later, she learned she had seventeen forms of staph on her leg and might lose her legs. She kept them. Last September she walked the Camino. That decision, made before any answer arrived, became Dana’s living definition of what she calls first cause. You must choose change first, she explains, and only then does the universe begin to respond. The synchronicities that followed, including her uncanny alignment with the late Louise Hay, convinced her there are no coincidences, only signs for those willing to wake up and pay attention. It was this turn, not inspiration but a refusal to keep living as she was, that led her into the work she does today. Stop handing out the golden tickets For years, Dana worked as an intuitive, handing people the answers, the direction, the way forward. Her business exploded, with a waiting list of a year or two and clients willing to pay almost anything for certainty. But she noticed it was not empowering anyone. It was creating dependency. So she stopped, closed her readings podcast, and chose a harder path: teaching people to sit in the uncomfortable zone and make their own decisions. The lesson behind her now reads simply, trust the process. Much of the conversation centres on the stories we tell ourselves. Roughly ninety-five per cent of how we navigate life runs below our awareness, Dana explains, and most of those repetitive thoughts are negative, which is why so many people feel trapped in their own Groundhog Day. Her antidote is the one degree, the single different action each day that, like a plane shifting course on the way to Hawaii, eventually lands you somewhere entirely new. Standards, not perfection Dana draws a clear line between self-protection and self-sabotage. What holds people back, she argues, is rarely a lack of effort. It is worthiness. When you do not believe you are worthy, you sabotage, no matter how much you achieve. What people truly fear is not scarcity but stepping over what she calls the terror barrier into everything new, where the ego can no longer protect them. She speaks candidly about her own addiction to perfectionism, the difference between attracting and chasing, and the courage of being seen. We attract in this life, she says, we do not chase. Some of the most moving moments come when Dana refuses to shame the past versions of herself who created the stories she needed to survive, and when she describes the ongoing work of being present for her three grown daughters, choosing consistency and accountability over defensiveness, and holding space for what cannot be fixed, only honoured. Dana leaves the audience with three golden nuggets: The Truth vs Story reset. When something triggers you, pause and separate the facts from the story you are telling yourself. Ask what else could be true, and you interrupt the spiral. The 10-minute self-trust builder. Each day make one small promise you can keep in ten minutes or less, then keep it. Confidence is built in small, reliable ways, not big leaps. The Does It Feel Like Love check-in. Before any decision, ask whether your choice is rooted in love or fear, so you act from self-respect. It is a generous, grounded conversation about choosing yourself, releasing the stories that keep you small, and remembering that the power to choose always lives in the present moment. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. Find Out More About Dana Grant Website: danagrant.com  Instagram: @therealdanagrant Facebook: Dana Grant YouTube: @therealdanagrant

    The Day She Tore Up Her Scripts And Chose To Live with Dana Grant

  7. Jun 23

    You Were Never Protecting Your Peace with Tania Khazaal

    Tania Khazaal has built her work around healing families, but she is the first to tell you she did not start there. She was the child who cut off her own mother and went no contact, certain she was protecting herself. She grew up in community housing, later lost her job and her home and lived out of her car, and moved through toxic relationships, heartbreak and health struggles. The turn back was not a single lightning bolt. It came through faith, neuroscience and a slow, deliberate rebuilding of who she believed she was. Her path into this work began with her own mother, who was on her deathbed from years of pharmaceutical dependency. Tania went looking for something natural that might help, and her mother became, in her words, her guinea pig. She came off her narcotics; the doctors could not believe it, and she is still alive today. That experience pulled Tania deep into the mind-body connection, and what she noticed there became the heart of her message. So many people ate well, exercised and did everything right on paper, yet stayed unwell. Again and again the missing piece was emotional: an unspoken resentment, a parent they had not spoken to in years, a wound they did not know how to release. Stop making your parents the villain Much of the conversation centres on what Tania calls Cutoff Culture, which she describes as the new rules of family repair. Language once confined to therapy rooms, words like narcissistic, triggering, trauma and boundaries, has spilled into everyday life, and parents often have no idea what these terms mean. Setting aside genuine abuse, she poses an uncomfortable question: at what point do you stop making your parents the villain and become the victor of your story rather than its permanent victim? Her framework moves through three stages of healing. Stage one is therapy, where wounds are uncovered and named. It is valuable, but many people get stuck there, endlessly rehearsing what happened to them. Stage two is the overlooked step of rewriting the other person’s story. When Tania wrote her mother’s history, one of sixteen children, the second youngest, fatherless at three, emotionally neglected, her resentment turned to compassion. Only then could she reach stage three and rewrite her own story with new meaning. She applied the same process to a former partner who had been violently abusive, not to excuse him, but to release herself from the resentment she had carried. As she puts it, hurt people hurt people, and most of the time they are simply a wounded child deflecting their own pain. Standards, not walls Tania draws a sharp line between protecting yourself and quietly abandoning people you still love. She challenges what she calls fake healing, where protecting your peace becomes an excuse to cut off anyone who activates an unhealed wound. Real peace, she says, is not the absence of chaos but an internal steadiness that outside chaos cannot shake. Boundaries, in her framing, were never about building walls. They are standards, a way of governing your own behaviour rather than controlling someone else. The repair itself happens in conversation. Somatic work, tapping and breathing calm the nervous system, she explains, but they rarely reach the root, which is why the same feelings keep resurfacing. The deeper release comes from leading with curiosity, letting the other person feel heard before explaining your own intention, and refusing to walk in defended and determined to be right. When someone is hurting, she says, your excuse can feel bigger than their pain. Tania leaves the audience with three golden nuggets: When someone tells you they have been hurt, do not defend yourself. Ask questions so they feel heard first, then share your side. Commit to learning one new thing for your own growth, because progress itself makes us happier. Make space for something bigger than yourself through prayer and praise, then do the work to meet it halfway. It is a generous, grounded conversation about accountability, compassion and the courageous conversations most of us are quietly avoiding. Watch the full conversation on YouTube. Find Out More About Tania Khazaal Website: https://taniakhazaal.com Instagram: @taniakhazaal Facebook: Tania the Herbalist YouTube: @taniakhazaal

    You Were Never Protecting Your Peace with Tania Khazaal

  8. Jun 16

    What Burnout is Actually Telling You

    Have you ever looked completely fine on the outside while feeling completely hollow on the inside? High functioning, high achieving, praised for holding it all together, and yet quietly evaporating within. What if that exhaustion you keep pushing through isn’t a sign that you need to try harder, but a message asking to be heard? In this Moment of Awe, we step into the quiet truth beneath the grind. We live in a culture that glorifies busyness, where somewhere along the way we were taught that exhaustion is proof of importance. So we keep going, past every signal our body sends us, because stopping feels like failure. But your burnout isn’t a flaw in your character. It’s a conversation your body has been trying to have with you for a very long time. If burnout were simply a rest problem, the solution would be easy. You sleep, you recover, you go again. Yet if you have ever climbed out of burnout only to find yourself right back in it six months later, you already know it is not that simple. Burnout is not the problem. Burnout is the message. And in this episode, we learn how to read it. After working with hundreds of high achievers, one truth keeps surfacing: burnout does not come from overwork. It comes from one of five hidden psychological drivers that sit quietly underneath it. And once you see yours, you cannot unsee it. The Five Hidden Drivers Beneath Burnout Burnout rarely begins with your calendar. It begins with a story you have been carrying, often since long before your current role. See if you recognise yours: Perfectionism, the belief that you must be flawless to be safe. Not high standards, but the quiet terror of being seen as not enough. People pleasing, the compulsion to earn love through self-sacrifice, and the fear that if you stop being everything for everyone, you will lose them. Over-identification with work, when your identity and your productivity become the same thing, so that without being useful you feel lost. Hyper-responsibility, the belief that everything will collapse if you step back even slightly. This runs deep in leaders, in caregivers, and in those who learnt to hold things together very early in life. Suppressed emotion, the part of you that learnt your feelings were inconvenient, that you should perform through grief and smile through pain. One of these is yours, and you likely already know which one. Three Things You Can Do Right Now Awareness is the beginning, but it isn’t the whole journey. Here are three gentle, practical steps you can take today. First, name the driver. Go back to those five and ask yourself honestly which one has been running the show, then write it down. Research from UCLA shows that simply naming an emotion reduces activity in the fear centre of the brain. Language, it turns out, is medicine. Second, integrate the story underneath it. Ask yourself: who told me I had to be this way? When did I start confusing exhaustion with importance? And what am I afraid will happen if I stop? You do not need the answers today. You just need to start asking the questions. Third, change one thing, not everything. Identify the smallest possible step, one honest conversation, one boundary you have been avoiding, one commitment to yourself you have been postponing, and do it this week. Not because it fixes everything, but because it signals to your nervous system that things are beginning to shift. This isn’t just an episode. It’s an invitation to stop treating your exhaustion as a personal failing and start listening to what it has been trying to show you. What if burnout is not a breakdown, but your body’s sacred refusal to keep living a life that no longer fits? On the other side of decoding this message is a version of you who does not have to earn rest, who does not have to perform to be loved, who does not have to burn in order to shine. You were never the fire. You were always the light. You can watch the video of this episode on YouTube. Newsletter: https://catherineplano.com for transformation. Instagram: @catherineplano for inspiration.

    What Burnout is Actually Telling You
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About

Your ultimate resource for expanding your mind and accessing more of your brain, while experiencing unparalleled ‘aha’ moments with guaranteed radical shifts to your learning and growth. Catherine’s goal is to help you become the very best version of yourself - to live an extraordinary life by reaching your fullest potential, with self-coaching strategies to boost your confidence, make better decisions, create new habits, kickstart your motivation, get extraordinary results and build lasting change for a meaningful life that you will absolutely love! Get inspired and energised with your weekly dose of new ideas and insights.

Information

  • Creator
    Catherine Plano
  • Years Active
    2016 - 2026
  • Episodes
    487
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    The Catherine Plano Podcast

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