When Ambition Becomes Avoidance | Burnout, Identity & Leadership

What happens when your identity becomes survival?

In this episode of Hustle Rebels, Renae unpacks the hidden cost of living in constant performance mode — especially for high achievers, leaders, first responders, parents, and professionals who feel responsible for holding everything together.

This episode explores:

• Why burnout is often tied to identity, not laziness
• The difference between strength and suppression
• How survival mode disconnects you from yourself and others
• Why ambition can become avoidance dressed up as productivity
• The emotional cost of always being “the strong one”
• How nervous system overload compounds over time
• Why purpose alone doesn’t protect you from burnout

Renae also shares a personal first responder story that shaped how she views emotional suppression, leadership, and the pressure to keep functioning no matter the cost.

Plus, a preview of next week’s conversation with retired U.S. Navy Master Chief Petty Officer Amaury Ponciano — a conversation about trauma, purpose, resilience, leadership, and what happens when the mission ends.

If you’ve been running on fumes and calling it “drive,” this episode is for you.

Want to work with Renae? Click here!

Or shoot her an email at waywardwellnesscoaching@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

He told me the thing that kept him going through the worst moments a human being can survive wasn't duty. It wasn't training. It wasn't even the person next to him. It was his mom. And then he said, but that's not the whole story. This is Hustle Rebels, the podcast for people who still want to win but aren't willing to burn themselves down to do it. I'm Renee, Burnout Recovery and Identity Coach, brain spotting practitioner, and of course, your host. I'd like to talk about how to find more sustainable ways of success without sacrificing yourself to a system that never pays back. Next week, I'm sitting down with someone whose story is going to make you rethink every excuse you've ever made about not dealing with your stuff. His name is Amori Ponciano and is a retired U.S. Navy Master Chief Petty Officer. That's E9, the highest enlisted rank in the Navy, and with 26 years of service, leading at some of the highest levels of operational excellence. He's also an author and someone who has lived everything we're talking about today from the inside out. But today, I'm not going to tell you what he has gone through, because that's his story to tell. But I will tell you what it made me think about and what I think it's going to surface for a lot of you. So by the end of this episode, you're going to understand why your drive isn't the problem, but what you're doing with it might be, what survival mode actually does to your identity over time, and the one question that is worth asking before you say yes to the next hard thing. And real quick, if this conversation hits, make sure you're subscribed. Because next week's episode is not one that you're going to want to skip or stumble onto by accident because you're going to want to be ready for it. So let's just hop right in. Before I get into what's been sitting with me since the conversation I had with Amri, I want to tell you about a moment from my own personal world because I think it's the same thing, just wearing a different uniform. I was on a call once where we were transporting someone who just got high at a music festival and they were a little paranoid. And while we were tied up, an 18-month-old was drowning nearby, and we couldn't respond. Someone mutual aid had to come out from somewhere further. And ultimately the baby didn't make it. So I wasn't the one working on that child. The ones who were, they were pulled into schism, critical incident stress management. Because what they went through qualified as a critical incident. They needed support and they got it. My partner and I were the ones that were sent to the family instead because we were unaffected. That was the word used by our chief. Unaffected. So we went with the police and knocked on the door, and uh we looked at them in the eyes and said the thing that no parent or grandparent should ever have to hear about their 18-month-old. And I felt wrecked. And then almost immediately, I felt guilty for feeling wrecked because I kept running this calculation in my head that I wasn't even on the call. You didn't revive anyone, you didn't even respond. What right do you have to feel anything? That calculation, that habit of deciding that we haven't earned the right to feel the weight of what we were carrying, that's what I want to talk about today. So it's around the survival of identity. Because next week, like I said, we're going to sit down with Amori. And while I'm going to leave his story for him to tell, I will say this one thing because it's been living in my head since the recording. He went through something at 18 years old that most of us will never come close to. And when I asked him what kept him going, he didn't say duty, he didn't say training, he didn't say the mission. He said his mom. That's it. That was his whole engine. And I want you to sit with that for a second, because there's a version of that answer that sounds like inspiration porn, right? Like find your why and you can survive anything. But that's not the whole story. And it's not even close. Because here's what nobody talks about. There's no Instagram memes for this. When you survive on pure purpose and adrenaline, when your identity becomes the mission, what happens when the mission or the job is over? That question is exactly what this week's conversation is about. But today I want to ask you a version of it that doesn't require surviving something extraordinary to answer. Who's forcing you to deal with your stuff? Because most of us don't have anyone. We just keep running, we keep producing, we keep performing, and we call it strength. But there's a difference between strength and suppression. And the scary part is from the outside, strength and suppression, they look exactly the same. And there's something that we all recognize, and it's the leadership mask. One of the things that Amory and I got into is this idea that leaders feel like they don't get to be human. Like you can have a moment, but only in private. You can fall apart, but only behind closed doors. And when you walk back out, you better have your face right. He shared something from his own experience leading people that again, I'm gonna let him tell you himself next week. Because it hit me in a way that I wasn't necessarily expecting, but it landed because I can relate to the feeling. In the first responder world, you don't really have a debrief culture unless someone forces it on you. You go from the worst thing you've ever seen straight back to the station and straight back to paperwork. And then you make a joke about it because that's just how you survive. And if you're good at your job, if you're the one people come to, you layer on top of that this identity of like, I'm the one that holds it all together. I'm the one that has to handle it. Now, I'm talking about first responders in the military right now, but I want to be very clear. You don't have to wear a uniform for this to be your story. You might be a manager inside of a corporation who's the one everyone brings their problems to before they escalate. You might be a teacher at a middle school holding 30 kids' emotional worlds every single day on top of your own. And you might be a mom who works full time and somehow also keeps an entire house from falling apart. The schedules, the appointments, the feelings, the logistics, everything, all of it. Mostly invisible, mostly unacknowledged. The uniform is different, the dynamic is exactly the same. And that identity becomes a cage. Because when you're the one who holds it all together, you don't get to ask for help. You don't get to say, I'm not okay. You don't get to be the one who needs something, because everyone needs something from you. And the cost of that isn't just personal, it flows downstream. So when you're empty, you can't actually show up for anyone else. You just perform showing up. And the people around you can feel the difference, even when they can't name it. And I want to think about this question that changes everything. We talked near the end of our conversation about sacrifice, about ambition, about the promotions and the titles and the moves that seem like the obvious next step. And when Amory said something I want to hand directly to you, not the story behind it, because again, I don't want to give too much away. But the question itself, is it worth it? Because the one thing you never get back is time. He made a decision near the end of his career that most people in his position probably wouldn't have made. He chose presence over advancement, and he'll tell you himself next week whether he regrets it. But I think about that in the context of my own life. Because I spent years running on a version of do more, push more, prove it. And the doing itself was never necessarily the problem. I love working, I love being useful, I love building something. But there's a version of ambition that's actually avoidance dressed up in productivity. Where you stay busy because busy means you don't have to look at the stuff. That's quietly sitting in the corner waiting for you. And I say that not to make you feel guilty about your drive. I say it because I think people listening to the show, you're not lazy, you're not unambitious, you're not the problem. But the question worth asking, and I am asking it of myself too, is this what are you building toward? And who did you say you were building it for? And when's the last time you checked in with them? It's not a performance check-in, not in a is everyone okay in passing, but a real one where you actually sit down and say, This thing I'm chasing, does it still make sense for all of us? Is this what we all actually want, or are we just in motion? Because if we don't actually do that, and you're just pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing in the name of ambition, but it's really an avoidance, that's where you lose that disconnect to those around you. And Amari will talk about how he's thankful that he was forced to seek help after this big incident that happened in his life. But like I said in the beginning, we generally don't have something that's a driving force to push us to seek help in certain aspects of our life. And it doesn't have to be because of some big dramatic or traumatic incident that happens in our life. It's the slow compounding things that happen in our life that destroys the connections that we have with those around us. And here's what I want you to take away from today. First, purpose is real. Having a why matters. Next week you're going to hear what Amri's why was and what it cost him to run on it for as long as he did. But the principle holds for all of us. Purpose alone doesn't protect you from the cost. It just gives you a reason to keep going while the bill accumulates. And at some point, you have to pay the tab. And here's the part I really want you to hear. The longer you wait, the higher that tab usually is. Omri was forced to pay it. A crisis made the decision for him. And the Navy. But I'm guessing you don't have anyone in your life forcing you to stop and deal with it, which means it's on you. And I know that that's not what anyone wants to hear, but putting yourself as a priority, actually prioritizing it, not just saying that you will, is one of the most important things that I could talk about in an entire podcast. And I don't even still think that that's enough space to stress it. It's something that I see come up constantly with clients that I work with in brain spotting session. And brain spotting is a modality that helps people get into their subcortical and their limbic systems. The parts of the brain where we actually store and hold trauma. The stuff that talk therapy alone just sometimes can't reach. And what comes up over and over again is people sitting with weight they've been carrying for years, the compounded weight, sometimes even decades, that they never gave themselves permission to put down. So pay the tab before it comes due on its own. Second, the mask you wear as a leader, as a parent, as the strong one, it costs you. And it costs the people around you. Not because you're wearing it, but because you wear it 24-7 and never let yourself breathe. Falling apart in private with people who get it, that's not weakness, that's maintenance. So find your version of that. Third, the question isn't whether you can sacrifice more. You probably can. You probably will. We're all hustlers. The question is whether the sacrifice is aimed at something that's actually yours and worth the sacrifice. Not the version of success you inherited from someone else. Not the thing that sounds right on paper. Yours. And that requires you to slow down long enough to even ask yourself it. Okay, that was a lot. So let's recap. We talked about survival mode and how the engine that gets you through hard things can also become the thing that keeps you from actually living. And we also talked about that leadership mask or that parent mask, that one that holds it all together, and how performing strength while privately drowning doesn't just hurt you, it flows downstream to those around you. And we also talked about the question the one that cuts through all of the noise. Is it worth it? For who? And have you actually asked them and yourself? Next week, Amori Ponciano is here, and I'll just say he has earned the right to say everything he's going to say. So come ready. If this episode stirred something up, and I mean that uncomfortable kind of stirred, not that feel good feeling kind. I want you to do one thing. Share this episode with someone who you know is also running on fumes and calling it drive. Not because they need to be fixed, but because sometimes the most powerful thing someone can hear is that they're not alone in this journey. And if you haven't already, subscribe because next week's episode is not one that you're gonna want to miss. You're gonna want to be ready for it. Also, if you want to learn more about uncovering some of these identities that are driving you and stopping you from having this piece, and you want to work directly with me, I'll put some of those links in the show notes as well. Otherwise, I want you to hear this last thing. You're not broken. You're just running on an operating system that has never been designed with you in mind. So keep that in mind this week. We'll see you next week.