You’re not burned out, maybe you’re building something you were never called to build.

Before you book another vacation or hire another VA, read this.

At the risk of sounding like I have it all figured out or something, I do not. This conclusion is brought to you by: failure. Let’s proceed into something that might wreck a few narratives, including some I held onto for way too long myself. If you’re anything like me, this one’s going to mess with you a little.

You’re not burned out.

You’re not burned out, overwhelmed, or just juggling too much.

I know, I know – it feels like burnout. The exhaustion, the Sunday night dread, the fantasies about selling everything and moving to a cottage in Portugal where nobody knows your name or your Calendly link. I’ve toyed with hitting the gas a little harder to make it up over this hill, and I’ve flirted with throwing it in park right there on the side of the proverbial road and opening a sourdough stand out of my trunk. If there’s a spectrum here, I’ve hit every milemarker.

There’s something I wish someone had told me during the years I kept white-knuckling my way through every season under the guise of grit…

The reason I was so depleted wasn’t because I needed better boundaries, or a more optimized morning routine, or better business systems. It was because I was pouring my absolute best into something God never asked me to build, and my entire being was rejecting the assignment like a body rejects a bad organ.

Let me back up…

It was the summer of 2015 and by all external measures, I was doing well.

I was twenty-eight years old, had just hit my first seven figure year, and my husband was able to leave his corporate career to be home with us (more on that another time). We were hosting a mastermind retreat in a mansion on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Twenty-five clients in attendance in a gorgeous setting ready for a whole production. And my mentor was there – the man who had walked with me through the gritty, unglamorous early years when the business felt fragile and the wins were scarce (or more so nonexistent).

This weekend was supposed to feel like a victory lap, and it did… for about twelve hours. Until we were sitting on the porch overlooking the lake and he looked at me and said something that I’m pretty sure rearranged my DNA (scientists, hold your fire… I enjoy hyperbole).

After an uncomfortable silence, he asked me point blank if he could be honest with me. I thought that maybe he was going to hit me with a noogie and a “well done, kid”, but instead I got…

“You’ve checked a lot of the boxes, Liz. But so what? Who cares if they’re not the right boxes.” He sat back in his chair like he hadn’t just detonated a grenade in my chest. “You’re focused on the wrong things, and running full speed towards them. God’s calling you to something greater, and you’ll never reach it like this. And you’re too busy and too stressed chasing it all to even see it.”

I wanted to punt him off the porch. Respectfully, of course.

Instead I sat there with that haunting pit deep in my gut. I knew he was right and I hated him for loving me enough to say it out loud. I had been running so hard for so long that I had never once stopped to ask whether I was running in the right direction. I just assumed that if I was tired, I needed to rest. If I was overwhelmed, I needed to delegate. If I was burning out, I needed better systems.

It never occurred to me that the exhaustion wasn’t a capacity problem… It was a calling problem.

So I’m bringing that thought here to the table, because I think a LOT of us live this way. I’ve had a slew of clients bringing this exact weight into sessions with me, only to find that even the most ambitious and successful ones (actually, especially the most ambitious and successful ones) are looking for a way out of the unsettled reality of pushing a boulder up the wrong mountain.

Diagnosing yourself with burnout and then treating it with rest, boundaries, vacations, new hires, better routines, the latest productivity app, a freaking cold plunge at 5am (please stop), isn’t working, is it?

Nothing is wrong with you…

It’s just that your soul has known for a while that this ain’t it. Soul, body, mind, feet. That’s the order this awakening tends to happen.

The soul is restless, the body feels heavy laden when it’s carrying something that’s incongruent, the mind starts to take notice, and only then do you change your actions (feet).

I wrote something in my book that keeps circling back to me as I write this here: “adding more efficiency to a misaligned life just makes you misaligned faster.” And man, did I live out that sentence (both the written sentence, and the metaphorical prison sentence) for YEARS before I was able to write it with clarity. I optimized, systemized, delegated, and streamlined a business that was never supposed to be my life’s work – and all that optimization did was make me sprint faster down the wrong road. More efficiently miserable. Fantastic.

Here’s how I figured out the difference between actual burnout and a calling problem…

Burnout is when you’re doing the right work at the wrong pace. The work still lights you up, it still matters to you, but you’ve been doing too much of it for too long without rest. That’s legit, and rest actually fixes that. Boundaries help some, maybe a vacation helps. You come back and you’re genuinely excited to reengage because the work itself isn’t the problem.

A calling problem is something else, though. It’s when you come back from the vacation and you’re unsettled or feeling dread within 48 hours. It’s when you take the sabbatical and realize you don’t actually miss the work, you just miss the identity it gave you. It’s when you’ve rested and you’ve delegated and you’ve optimized and you’ve set all the boundaries and you’re STILL exhausted in a way that sleep doesn’t touch, because the exhaustion isn’t in your body any longer. It’s in your soul. And your soul is telling you – screaming at you, actually – that this isn’t what you were put here to do.

But fear not… before you assume this is some rally cry to burn it all to the ground and start over as a missionary, that’s not what I’m saying at all. In fact, you might be called to the same career, the same business, the same skillset, but done differently. Keep tracking with me, we’ll get there.

I want to be really honest about why it took me so long to see this, in case the same thing is a block for you or some ambitious nutjob that you love.

I didn’t want it to be a calling problem. Burnout was so much more convenient.

Burnout meant I could keep the business, keep the identity, keep the revenue, keep the lifestyle, but I just needed to manage myself better. Burnout let me keep my life intact and just adjust the settings a bit.

A calling problem meant something way scarier. It meant that the thing I had spent years building – the thing that other people admired, the thing that paid the bills, the thing I had literally woven into my identity – might need a gutting.

And if it wasn’t mine to carry, then who was I without it?

“Successful business owner” was an identity I understood. “Woman who walked away from seven-figure revenue streams because God told her to” is not exactly a LinkedIn headline that inspires confidence, ya know?

But God doesn’t really care about your LinkedIn headline. He cares about whether you’re available for what He actually designed you to do, and if you’re spending 80% of your energy on an assignment that’s no longer aligned, you’re not available, you’re just busy. And busy is the most acceptable-looking form of disobedience I’ve ever seen in driven people, myself very much included.

Here’s what happened when I finally let myself go there…

My mentor’s porch grenade didn’t change my life overnight. I heard him and I knew he was right, and then like any good little know-it-all, I went back to doing exactly what I was doing for another few years because denial is a powerful drug and I was on a pretty high dose.

It took nearly dying on an operating table – losing our son in a stillbirth, losing half my blood volume – for the message to finally land in a place I could no longer ignore. And even then, my first instinct when I started recovering was to try to go back to how things were before. To resuscitate the old life instead of letting God resurrect a new one. (Sound familiar? If you read last week’s letter, you know exactly what I’m talking about.)

But slowly, painfully, with the subtlety of a wrecking ball, it became clear: I wasn’t failing. I wasn’t burned out. I was massively, spectacularly misaligned. I was pouring my best energy into work that didn’t require the full measure of who I was, and paying for it with my time, my peace, and my capacity. My family was also paying a steep price, and that gutted me the most.

So I did the thing… I excavated my entire professional life. Reworked the business model. Released huge contracts that were paying well but costing me more than I was willing to keep paying out. Stopped calling myself a coach. Started writing the book that had been sitting in me for years, banging on the walls trying to get out. Shifted timelines. Let go of the revenue goals that had been running my life like a tyrannical GPS.

Was it terrifying? Unbelievably. I had a family to provide for. Five kids. A husband building his own business. This was not the responsible, strategic move, but it was the obedient one. Obedience and strategy don’t always look the same, which is something they should really mention more often in business books.

But here’s what happened on the other side of it: I found my actual sweet spot. The work that doesn’t drain me because it was designed for me. Actually, I was designed for it! The writing, the advising, the deep conversations with founders who are right where I was. I went from grinding through 50-60 hour weeks and feeling hollow to working 10-15 hours a week and feeling more aligned than I have in my entire career. And weirdly enough, more profitable (that deserves it own series)!

Ten hours. I know how that sounds, but it turns out you don’t need that many hours when you’re doing the right work. The hours were never the problem, the misalignment was.

So here’s my question for you:

Is the thing that’s exhausting you actually the right thing at the wrong pace? Or is it the wrong thing all together?

If rest keeps not working, if the vacation buzz wears off before you even unpack your suitcase, if you keep optimizing a life that still feels like it’s costing you more than it’s giving, it might not be a burnout problem. It might be that God’s been trying to get your attention for a while now, and you keep treating His whisper like a scheduling issue instead of divine orchestration.

Before you decide something is wrong with you, consider the possibility that you’re standing in what I call the Desert – which, for what it’s worth, is the starting place of every deeper assignment I’ve ever witnessed. In my own life and in the lives of hundreds of leaders I’ve walked alongside.

So take a breath, look around, and ask the question you’ve been avoiding.

Is this still what I’m meant to be building? Is this how I’m meant to build it?

Everything that matters starts right there.

Join me on Substack and let me know if you feel you are building what you are called to, I’d love to know.

Liz