Why You Can't Outwork a Belief You Never Chose | Burnout, Identity & the RAS

Before next week's conversation with young entrepreneur Kai Brown, Renae gets personal — and goes deep on something most burnout conversations completely miss: the beliefs you never actually chose.

In this solo episode, Renae shares a story she's never told publicly — about watching her mom lose her career and her lungs to something completely outside her control, and how that moment quietly wired a belief in Renae that would show up decades later as self-sabotage she couldn't explain.

Because here's what nobody tells you about burnout: you can change your habits, your schedule, your job title — and still feel stuck. Not because you're broken, but because the belief underneath hasn't moved. And until it does, you'll keep renovating the house without ever touching the foundation.

In this episode, Renae breaks down: — Why the beliefs driving your burnout aren't actually yours — How your reticular activating system filters reality to match what you already believe — Why behavior change keeps failing without identity work underneath it — What to sit with before next week's conversation with Kai Brown

Plus — a sneak peek at something Renae is building for women who are tired of feeling unheard and misunderstood in their relationships — The Sheepdog Framework.

🔗 Burn the Blueprint: [Burn the Blueprint: 4 week Identity Reset] 

📩 Work with Renae: [waywardwellnesscoaching.org]

Transcript

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Here's a little truth nugget. A crushed and controlled employee is a compliant employee. This is Hustle Rebels, the podcast for people who still want to win, but are no longer willing to burn themselves down to do it. I'm Renee, your trustee host, and as well as a burnout recovery and identity coach. And here we like to talk about how not to continue being a slave to a system that never gives back. So stick around if you are tired of sacrificing yourself and ready for a more sustainable way of success. If you've ever looked at your life, the job, the schedule, the version of yourself that you perform every single day, and you felt this quiet, nagging sense that none of it actually fits, then this episode is going to be for you because by the end of this one, you're going to understand why changing your behavior hasn't worked and what's really underneath that burnout that you can't quite seem to shake, and why next week's guest, Kai Brown, might be one of the most important and interesting conversations that I've had on this show yet. And real quick, if you've been listening for a while and you haven't yet subscribed, I highly recommend that you do it right now because this podcast is where we stop performing success and start actually building it. So let's just hop right in. I want to ask you guys something, and I want you to actually sit with it for a second. When did you decide what kind of life was possible for you? Not what you want, because most of us know what we want. I mean, when did you decide, somewhere deep and quiet, what you were actually allowed to have? Because here's what I've been thinking about a lot lately. Most of us didn't consciously choose our beliefs about success and money and work or what we deserve. We just inherited them, we absorbed them from the adults in our lives who were doing their best, who loved us, who were also carrying their own unexamined wounds themselves. And those beliefs got handed down like furniture. You didn't pick them, you didn't even notice them move in. But they've been running your decisions ever since. And I'll give you a personal example. And this is one that I haven't really talked about publicly before. When I was young, my mom got a promotion at work, which sounds like a great thing, right? And it was. Until it wasn't. Because that promotion came with a new office that, without anyone knowing, was slowly destroying her lungs because of formaldehyde. And by the time anyone understood what was actually happening, the damage was done. Her alveoli were fused. She was forced to leave her career. And just like that, a woman who had worked incredibly hard her entire life, through no fault of her own, because of something that was done to her, lost the ability to work for the rest of her life. I watched that happen and I didn't process it. I just stored it. Fast forward to my own career. Within 18 months, I had three surgeries. I was forced out of my own job that I had built my identity around. And what I didn't realize, not until I actually did the internal work recently, because I felt a block when it came to my own business, is that somewhere inside of me, I had been carrying a quiet belief that this is just how it goes. That if you get hurt, if something forces you off that path, that's it. You don't get to rebuild. You don't get to have a work-life balance on the other side of that. You just lose. I wasn't consciously thinking that. I was just living it. I was self-sabotaging in small, invisible ways, staying just comfortable enough to avoid the thing that I actually wanted, which is significant growth in my business, because some part of me believed that reaching for it would only end the same way, which is the rug being ripped out from underneath you. But that belief wasn't mine. I had absorbed that from a moment that was never about me from the beginning. And my mom, who is one of the hardest working, most giving people that I know, had no idea that she handed that down to me because she didn't. Not intentionally, because that's not how this works. It's never intentional. It's just what happens when kids are watching, they're filing things away. And just trying to make sense of a world that sometimes, most of the time, doesn't make sense. And that's exactly what next week's conversation cracked open with me. Here's what I've come to understand about that. Our brains are not neutral. They're just filing cabinets holding memories. They're search engines, constantly running these queries based on what we already believe is true. And as David Bayer likes to say, our brains are a goal-achieving machine. So if you believe that money is hard to make, then your brain is going to spend every single day finding you evidence for that. And it's going to be good evidence, compelling evidence. A whole page of results. But what it won't show you, what gets filtered out, is the equally long list of evidence that it doesn't have to be that way. There's a name for the part of your brain that does this filtering, the reticular activating system. And if you've been around this show or worked with me for a while now, you will know that I talk about this a lot. It's one of the most powerful concepts that I come back to again and again because once you understand it, you cannot unsee it. Literally, your filter. Your RAS is essentially the bouncer of your brain, deciding what gets through and what gets filtered out based entirely on what you already believe to be true. You are not seeing reality. You are seeing the version of what reality confirms that you already believe. And I'll put it to you this way: as a first responder, when we ask witnesses what they think has happened, I will tell you, if you ask three of them, chances are you're going to get three different answers because they're viewing it from a perspective from three different lenses. And that's because their mass is what changes it. And it's not a character flaw, it's just a survival mechanism. But it means the problem was never your work ethic, your discipline, or your strategy. And next week, my guest, Kai Brown, brings a completely different perspective on this. What it actually looks like when someone who grows up with a RAS that was never programmed with scarcity in the first place. So that conversation really hits different. The problem is the query that you've been running. Now, here's where it also gets interesting and a little uncomfortable, because most of us, when something isn't working, look at what's in front of us and we try to fix it. A lot of us are fixers. The offer isn't good enough, the timing was wrong, our boss is being difficult, the economy is hard. And sometimes those things are true. But what we almost never do, because it's genuinely harder, is ask ourselves this question. What belief inside of me is creating this situation? Because that's a bigger pill to swallow. It means taking responsibility for things that really did feel like they happened to you. It means asking hard questions about the choices that you made, the rooms that you put yourself in, and the version of yourself that you showed up as. It means accepting that the garden got overgrown. Not because life is cruel, but because nobody taught you to weed it. And I don't say that to make you feel worse about yourself. I say it because the flip side of that responsibility is actually freedom. If you created it, that means that you can change it. The weed that you pull today is one less thing choking what's trying to grow. So here's what I want you to take away from this before next week in my conversation with Kai. The reason behavior change is so hard isn't because you lack willpower. It's because you keep trying to renovate the house without touching the foundation. You change the routine, the habit, and the goals, but the belief underneath stays exactly the same. And the belief, or the root, is what's generating the behavior in the first place. So next week, like I said, I'm sitting down with Kai, who was someone who grew up without most of the conditioning that we've been talking about today. His parents intentionally avoided passing down their own fear-based beliefs around money and success and really what it means to earn a good life. And the result is a young entrepreneur who didn't inherit the scarcity, the grind mentality, or the idea that you have to suffer before you're allowed to thrive. That's a painful one for all of us to hear. He's going to challenge some things that we've been told are just how it works. And I think the most useful question that you can sit with between now and then is this. Whose voice is that? When you tell yourself you have to earn the right to rest, or that you're not ready yet, or that people like you don't get to have it easy, whose voice is that? Because I'm willing to bet it's not entirely yours. Alright, so let's pull this all together and recap. We've been handed beliefs that we didn't necessarily choose about work, worth, money, and what success is supposed to cost us. Those beliefs function like a filter, showing us only the evidence that proves them right. And because we can't see the filter, we keep trying to change our results without ever actually touching the source of it. So next week, I'm sitting down with Kai Brown, who grew up with a fundamentally different filter and who has also built his life and his work around helping others dismantle theirs. He's young, he's grounded, and the conversation we had genuinely shifted something within me as well. So I think it'll do the same for you. So if this landed and you want to go deeper, the Burn the Blueprint program is where we do this work with real structure and real support. The link is going to be in the description in the show notes. Also, I'm working on something I'm really excited about, and I'm just going to leave this here for now. I'm putting together a small, intimate cohort. We're talking 10 to 12 women, for anyone who is tired of carrying the burden, feeling unheard, or just misunderstood within their relationship. This is where I will teach you how to actually get what you desire without having to argue, without having to repeat yourself, and without having to exhaust yourself trying to be understood. Think of it like this: a sheepdog can direct an entire flock with quiet precision. And the flock doesn't even realize that it's happening. That's the energy. It's called the sheepdog framework. More details are going to be coming soon, but if that already sounds like something that you would be like a huge hell yes in, or you know a woman that would be also interested in it, you know where to find me. And if you're not already subscribed, do so now because you're not gonna want to miss next week's conversation with Kai Brown. It's one that you're gonna want to definitely send as someone who has kids or someone that is trying to be a young entrepreneur as well. You're not broken, you're just running on an outdated operating system. I will see you guys next week.