You Are Not A Frog

If you nod in a meeting, then say what you really think afterwards this episode is for you. Our ingrained programming tells us we have to please everyone all the time to feel good enough, so we choose ‘nice’ to keep the peace. Unfortunately that stores the pain up for later, and it will affect your next decision, and the one after that. In this episode with Alice Driscoll and Louise van Haarst, co-founders of The Powerhouse and authors of Smart Conflict, we get into how to have the conversation that would actually lighten the load on us - incl...

If you’ve ever plucked up the courage to have ‘that’ conversation, and planned it carefully so that you can be kind and clear - but two minutes in, it goes south - you’ll know what it feels like when their face changes, your chest gets tight, and suddenly you're both defensive and you’re both feeling got at.

This replay from January 2025 is part of our season on conflict and difficult conversations, re-released while I'm in the middle of writing my book How to Say No When Someone Might Die. I keep coming back to it because...

Have you ever lain awake replaying a conversation with a tricky colleague, wondering if you were the one completely out of order? If you're a high achiever in a leadership role, you know the dilemma - you don't want to be the bad guy, so you avoid the awkward chat, pick up everyone else's slack, and say yes when you mean no. Then it leaks out at the worst possible moment.

In this fun episode I play Am I the A**hole? with Leanne and Al Elliott from Truth, Lies and Work. I read out workplace dilemmas...

Have you ever felt ashamed or frustrated that you didn't know the answer? Not to a clinical question, but about your own life - what's next, what's wrong, why you feel the way you do?

If you're the one everyone relies on, not knowing can feel like failing at the one thing you're supposed to be good at. This is a replay from 2024 I'm bringing back while I’m writing my book ‘How to Say No When Someone Might Die’. One of the things I keep coming back to in the book is how much of the load w...

You may think you're fine. You're still performing well at work, still the one people rely on, yet you know something's off.

In this episode - a replay of one of my most important conversations from 2025, I share the question that changed how I think about burnout: What are you borrowing from your life to keep your work looking fine? For many of us, our ingrained programming tells us we have to please everyone all the time to feel good enough, so we protect our work and borrow energy from the rest of our life to do...

You tell yourself that never letting anyone down is how you protect the people you love. But our ingrained programming tells us we have to please everyone all the time to feel good enough - and the people you love are the people who suffer most when you're stuck in the Responsibility Trap. They get the tired, thin version of you. If you lie awake worried you've upset someone, or feel guilty for saying no to something small like a dinner you can't make until November, this 20-minute Quick Dip will show you why that guilt isn't telling the...

Do you lie awake replaying a decision you had to make? That work anxiety loop where you can't stop thinking about work even when you are home? Maybe you've told yourself burnout is just the occupational hazard of this job.

You've tried to put things in place — to leave on time, to say no more often — and you just can't seem to hold them. What if you are solving the wrong problem? It's not a work stress problem, but an identity one.

Our ingrained programming tells us we have to tie who we are to how...

Note: This is a re-release of one of our most-listened to episodes — originally recorded Autumn 2025. We've given it a new edit because it's more relevant than ever.

If you know you need to do something about how you're feeling — but you keep telling yourself "not yet" — this is for you. We are very good at spotting danger in other people. Sepsis, red flags, a patient or client deteriorating. We act fast. With ourselves, we don't. We wait until it becomes catastrophic — a patient or client complaint, an error because our brain isn't working properly, our health going — before we...

Every high-achieving leader has a to-do list that doesn't end — it just refills. And the only response most of us were ever handed for that is push harder. Grip tighter. Muscle through. In this episode, Rachel talks to Ellen Coomber, co-founder of the Softness Revolution, about why that instinct — the one we were trained into from exams onward — stops working, and what she does instead. Ellen has a genetics degree from Cambridge; she is not someone who arrived at this by avoiding rigour. She arrived at it because pushing harder had genuinely stopped working, and she had to find someth...

Nearly one in three people who take time off for burnout are off again within a year - and over half of them work in healthcare. This episode is about why that keeps happening, and it isn't because anyone's weak.

You go back to the same poisoned water, you carry the same responsibility you carried before, and now there's something extra on top of it - a shame tax, the pressure to prove you're fine, to prove the time off wasn't a mark against you. Rachel walks through the Bent Tent Pole - why the same load...

There's a project you've been meaning to start, a conversation you've been meaning to have, or a change you've been meaning to make. You know that you can do it, but what you can't quite find is the moment, the time, or the right conditions…and so it waits.

Robbie Swale is a coach and author who has spent years thinking about why capable, intelligent, hard-working people don't start the things they most want to do, and what it takes to change that. In this conversation, we explore the idea that the problem isn't time; it never re...

Most of us were taught that having limits is a weakness - something to push through, not something to honour. And if you're a doctor, a nurse, a vet, or anyone in a high-stakes role, that message arrived early and arrived hard. The result is a profession full of people operating at full stretch capacity without realising it, because full stretch became the new normal so gradually that we stopped noticing.

In this conversation with Sarah Coope - former GP, CEO of Wild Monday, and executive coach - we explore what happens when we stop thinking about...

Most of us have been told that burnout is caused by overwork and that the solution is to rest, take a break or slow down. Set some boundaries. But what if that's only part of the picture? What if the very thing that made you good at your job - your values, your drive, your commitment to never letting anyone down - is exactly what keeps burning you out? And what if rest, on its own, isn't enough to get you out?

In this conversation with Nick Petrie, author, leadership researcher and burnout specialist, we go deeper...

Every doctor and high-achieving professional knows what it feels like to lie awake with a brain that refuses to stop - replaying a decision made that afternoon, running tomorrow's list at midnight, scanning ahead for what might go wrong. Our ingrained programming tells us that more thinking keeps us safe and keeps things running. But there is a cost to that, and our analytical brains (the very thing that makes us good at our jobs) may be the reason we can't rest.

In this conversation with Giles Croft, former NHS surgeon and coach, we explore what happens...

Boundaries aren't walls. They're fences. A wall keeps everyone out. A fence has a gate, and it's yours to open or close, if you're willing to hold it when someone pushes.

That idea comes from this conversation with Dr Sarah Coope, recorded for the Your Coaching Journey podcast. Sarah talks about her own route into coaching, what twenty years of coaching doctors has taught her about self-worth, and why so many of us try to fix things that were never ours to fix.

In this episode:

There is one belief that keeps high achievers stuck in burnout long after they should be recovering - the belief that burning out means they failed.

This is a live panel discussion from the Burnout Free Working Conference — an unscripted conversation about what burnout recovery actually requires, why the self-blame makes it impossible to start, and the single reframe that changes how you see every struggling colleague, including yourself.

We cover:

There's something most leaders do - we avoid the conversation that needs to be had. We care too much about the wrong things: how the other person will react, whether it will make things awkward, whether we'll be the one blamed if they go off sick. Our ingrained programming tells us that keeping the peace is the same as keeping the relationship, but it isn't.

In this episode, Joe Weston is back for round two to explain why conflict avoidance - the silence, the corridor moaning, the feedback we give and immediately want to apologise for...

A doctor emailed me recently, she's been in medicine for 25 years, and the question she asked was one I've heard in a hundred different ways: "Am I a snowflake?"

She felt a great deal of shame about finding things hard - something I see time and time again in high achievers. Like the feeling that not coping is proof of something wrong with you. A character flaw. A sign you've gone soft.

But the data tells a different story. In a survey we did of over 600 health and social care professionals, nearly one in three...

When Aoife O'Brien is close to burnout, she doesn't want to stop. She wants to do more. One more task. One more thing to get through before she can stop. She says that's how she knows now - not the exhaustion, not the breaking point, but the acceleration. If you recognise that feeling, this conversation names what's actually happening. Not to add to your list. To give you a cleaner way to read what your own system is telling you.

We cover:

You may have been counting down to summer all year, telling yourself that you just need to survive until your next holiday. You may have been looking forward to taking a pause and getting a chance to finally breathe.

But when you get to your holiday, instead of feeling rested, you feel more exhausted, more overwhelmed, and more behind. And somewhere underneath the busyness, you might be thinking: what's wrong with me? Everyone else seems fine.

Nothing is wrong with you - you just fell into the summer Urgency Trap - one of the seven...

If you've always felt like everyone else got an unwritten handbook about how to behave at work - and you've had to figure it out yourself, one interaction at a time - this episode is for you.

This week, Rachel’s in conversation with Kirstie Pickles: vet, autistic ADHD professional, and EDI advocate. Kirstie was diagnosed as an adult - after years of masking in a high-stakes clinical role, performing competence while running on empty underneath.

We talk about:

Burnout in high stress jobs isn't always about doing too much; sometimes it's about a belief you were never taught to question.

You finished your day, finished (most) of your tasks, and you still can't switch off. Most people assume that's a workload problem, but the reason people in demanding roles like medicine can't genuinely rest isn't about how much they've done - it's about what they've been conditioned to believe about rest itself

In this episode, Rachel introduces the Superhero Delusion: the conviction that the rules about rest apply to other people. Not to...

Getting a complaint from a colleague is one of the most destabilising things that can happen to a high-achieving leader. Not because of the process, but because of what it makes you ask about yourself.

In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Pallavi Bradshaw, Medical Director at the MPS, to talk about something that doesn't get named nearly enough: a complaint from a colleague isn't a patient or client complaint. It feels very different and can be devastating if our ingrained programming tells us that we have to please everyone all the time to feel good enough...

Imposter syndrome is something we often don’t talk about openly, and the standard advice - build your confidence, reframe your thinking, remember your achievements – rarely addresses the real cause.

In this Quick Dip, Rachel shares a piece of feedback she received years ago that still stings and uses it to unpick what imposter syndrome really is: it’s not a confidence gap, it’s not a skills deficit, but something much more personal.

She talks about why working on your confidence alone will never be enough, what's actually driving that voice that says you're about to...

If you constantly find yourself picking up tasks that nobody else will do, staying late to cover gaps, or slowly absorbing more and more without anyone asking you to - this episode is going to name exactly what's happening.

Occupational psychologist Leanne Elliott joins Rachel to unpack why over-responsibility isn't a personality flaw; it's what happens when you don’t have absolute clarity on what tasks are definitely part of your role – and, more crucially, what tasks aren’t.

They explore why conscientious professionals in under-resourced settings are most at risk, how the 'if I don't...

You know something needs to change, but you just have no idea what, how, or where to begin, and your lack of a plan may be starting to feel like failure.

In this Quick Dip, Rachel unpacks why the belief that you need everything mapped out before you're allowed to move is the very thing keeping you stuck, and introduces the AB-Z method: a simple framework that replaces the impossible task of knowing your whole future with a far more manageable one.

This episode is about how to craft your work, not how to leave...

If you have ever ended a clinical day exhausted not from the medicine itself but from the weight of everybody else's feelings, this episode might hit home.

Josh Connolly, resilience coach and author of ‘It's Them Not You’, joins me to explore why many healthcare professionals take on so much of the emotional load for everyone - and how that pattern almost always began long before medical school.

Key Takeaways

If you’ve ever thought to yourself ‘if I don’t do it, no one will’ this episode is for you. You tell yourself something important will go wrong if you don't do it all - but what if that's not what's actually driving your decisions?

In this Quick Dip, Rachel suggests something uncomfortable: that the decisions running your workload might less to do with patient safety than they are to do with who you believe yourself to be.

Because the question 'if I don't do it, who else will?' is often not about the risk...

You're working hard, doing excellent clinical work, and genuinely trying to make things better for your patients - so why does it feel like no one's listening? So many healthcare professionals hit a wall where their ideas get talked over, their proposals stall, and their careers plateau, even when their track record is strong.

In this episode, Rachel is joined by Sam Pearce and Sally Powell, co-founders of Impactful Women, to talk about political intelligence - what it actually is, why it feels uncomfortable at first, and how building the right relationships strategically (and with integrity) is...

Every day in healthcare, a meeting ends, and a problem that was never formally handed to anyone lands on the person who cares most - you.

If you've ever walked out of a room carrying something that somehow became yours without anyone asking, this Quick Dip Episode gives that experience a name, explains exactly why it keeps happening to people like you, and gives you the language to start pushing back on it.

Listen to other episodes in the Over-Responsibility Trap series:

How many times this week have you thought, "I just don't have a choice"? About your rota, your inbox, the extra patient squeezed in at the end of clinic? That thought feels true, and it can feel like a fact... But what if it’s actually a story, and that story is costing you your peace of mind?

In this episode, Rachel sits down with Robbie Swale, coach, author of ‘The Power to Choose’, and creator of the 12 Minute Method, to dig into why reclaiming a sense of agency and choice matters so deeply for your wellbeing. Togeth...

Have you ever had someone ask for “a quick bit of help”… and somehow ended up owning the entire task?

In caring professions, requests for help can feel less like requests and more like responsibilities landing on us. We’re trained to notice problems, fix things and support colleagues - which means it can feel incredibly uncomfortable to say no.

In this Quick Dip episode, Rachel explores the moment when a simple request triggers our helping reflex, and why so many capable professionals end up carrying work that was never meant to be theirs.

Learni...

The founder of the National Association of Sessional GPs on whether the grass is always greener, and the changes you can make in your career without feeling like a frog forced to jump out of the pan.

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Am I Stressed, Overwhelmed... or Burning Out?
Get honest with yourself — discover what’s really going on, and what to do next.

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Have you ever looked at a task on your plate and wondered when it became your responsibility?

Nobody asked you to do it. Nobody assigned it to you. But somehow it landed on you, and now you're carrying it.

In this Quick Dip, Rachel explores the responsibility trap - the pattern where capable and conscientious professionals automatically pick up unclaimed problems. Over time, these responsibilities accumulate, increasing your workload, emotional labour, and ultimately contributing to burnout.

This episode explores why responsible people are particularly vulnerable to this trap and how being more deliberate...

Mindset shifts to help you explore difficult feelings and find solutions without falling into rescuer mode or getting overwhelmed.

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Am I Stressed, Overwhelmed... or Burning Out?
Get honest with yourself — discover what’s really going on, and what to do next.

⭐️ Book Your FrogFest Ticket Now

There’s more on your plate than you realise, and most likely you’re trying to cram 25 hours of work into a 24 hour day, not counting sleep and time away from work. Here’s some practical advice to help you see what’s on your plate, and what you need to sacrifice.

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What happens when we need to raise a serious concern that could affect patient safety? And what happens if someone raises a concern to you?

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Am I Stressed, Overwhelmed... or Burning Out?
Get honest with yourself — discover what’s really going on, and what to do next.

What does it mean for a doctor to be “good”? Can you be “good” and still take care of yourself? And how can we rescue ourselves from the trap of thinking that asking for support is somehow a moral failing?

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Practical questions from a clinical psychologist to help you assess whether you’re in a harmful work environment, or one that doesn’t align with your values or strengths.

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Mentioned in this episode:

Am I Stressed, Overwhelmed... or Burning Out?
Get honest with yourself — discover what’s really going on, and what to do next.

⭐️ Book Your FrogFest Ticket Now

And what BBC’s The Traitors can teach us about trust, group-think, and truth.

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