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charlenegisele 🎙The Charlène Gisèle® Show
Master Coach | Ex Lawyer
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09/09/2026

In elite sport, as in business, the greatest players are always the ones most at risk of burnout.

Not the average ones. The best ones.

In elite sport, rest and recuperation are treated as seriously as practice. As seriously as the mindset you bring into competition.

By contrast, in the workplace, the expectation is that you are always performing. Ten, fifteen, twenty performance moments a day. Meetings. Calls. Negotiations. Presentations. Difficult conversations.

All back to back.

So when exactly is your rest and recuperation supposed to happen?

I sat down with Performance Psychologist Dan Abrahams, who has spent 20 years working with some of the best athletes, teams, and coaches in the world to explore how we can sustain peak performance at work.

In this episode, we explore:
- Why the highest performers are always the ones most at risk of burnout
- Dan's three word framework for sustainable performance: mindset, mastery, and management
- Why corporate professionals may actually have it harder than elite athletes when it comes to recovery
- How to build in the small moments of rest that keep you performing without breaking down

Comment EP132 and I will send this conversation straight to your DMs.

04/09/2026

We often talk about burnout as something that happens because we work too much.

But what happens when you burn out, decide to optimise yourself, and end up creating a whole new way to stress yourself out?

That was the story my latest podcast guest, Salim, knows very well.

After leaving corporate and getting deep into the world of biohacking, he started optimising everything. He was running 10 miles every other day, listening to three audiobooks a week, fasting, training, and constantly looking for the next way to improve his performance.

From the outside, it looked like discipline.

But underneath it was the same Type A, extreme mindset that had driven him in the first place.

The environment had changed but the pattern didn’t.

And I think this is something we do not talk about enough when it comes to high achievers.

You can leave the corporate world, change your habits, buy all the right devices, practise all the right wellness rituals, and still be operating from the same underlying need to optimise, achieve, and push harder.

Salim calls this “biohacking burnout,” and I found that idea incredibly revealing!

Because perhaps the goal is not to become less ambitious, less driven, or less intense. Perhaps it is to learn how to harness those qualities without letting them run the show.

As Salim says, that extreme personality can actually be our greatest gift when we learn to bring it into alignment with our highest intention.

That is a very different definition of high performance.

Comment EP131 and I will send this conversation straight to your DMs.

26/08/2026

“I wish I had known this years ago."

It is the line that infertility specialist, Dr. Sasha Hakman hears more than any other.

And she hears it from women who are brilliant, accomplished, and often blindsided by something nobody ever explained to them earlier on.

We are born with every egg we will ever have. And every month after puberty, we lose a thousand more. That is not a warning. It is just biology. But it is biology we are never taught.

Dr. Sasha Hakman is a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist based in Los Angeles. And every female fertility physician she knows has frozen her eggs, not out of fear, but because they understood what age does to fertility and planned accordingly.

In this episode, we explore:
- The most common physiological causes of infertility, including PMOS (formerly known as PCOS) and endometriosis
- The real physiological trade-offs in delaying motherhood for career reasons
- The biggest predictors of reproductive success
- The real difference between freezing eggs and freezing embryos

The episode is to help us understand our own biology well enough to make informed choices when the time comes.

Comment EP130, and I will send this conversation straight to your DMs.

21/08/2026

During this holiday season, how rested do you actually feel?

This is what I’m hearing daily from my clients in August: "I'm exhausted. And I should be able to rest now. But I just feel restless instead..."

How often have you thought that?

You finally lie down and your brain will not stop. You take a holiday and come back more tired than when you left. You sleep eight hours and still wake up depleted.

The problem is not your discipline or your schedule.
It is that you are getting the wrong type of rest.

Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith is a physician, researcher, and bestselling author of Sacred Rest. Her TEDx talk and book on the seven types help find words for something we can carry for years… the constant exhaustion and inability to just ‘relax’.

Because rest is not just sleep. And exhaustion is not just physical.

In this episode, we explore:
- Why sleep and rest are not the same thing
- 7 types of rest and what a deficit in each one actually feels like
- How sensory overload, emotional labor, and creative drain show up in your body
- What a personal rest strategy actually looks like in a high pressure life
- Why protecting your rest is the most powerful thing you can do for the people you serve

If you’re struggling with anxiety, restlessness and stress - this is for you!

Comment EP129, and I will send this conversation straight to your DMs.

Somewhere along the way we started treating exhaustion like proof of commitment.The late nights. The inbox at midnight.T...
28/07/2026

Somewhere along the way we started treating exhaustion like proof of commitment.

The late nights. The inbox at midnight.
The way we say, "I haven't taken a real day off in months", like it's a flex.

It's not.
It's just wear and tear you're calling ambition.

I've watched senior people talk about their burnout like it's a resume line. Like the fact that they're running on empty means they care more, work harder, want it more than everyone else.

But the people actually still standing after twenty, thirty years in high pressure roles didn't get there by wearing exhaustion like a badge.

They got there by treating rest as part of the job, not the reward for finishing it.

Rest is what keeps your judgment sharp, your patience intact, and your decisions good under pressure.
It's not time off from the work. It's what makes you capable of doing it well for longer.

What's one thing you'd let yourself do differently if rest wasn't something you had to earn first?

I thought being busy was the same as being important.Back-to-back calls, an inbox that never hit zero, evenings that tur...
27/07/2026

I thought being busy was the same as being important.

Back-to-back calls, an inbox that never hit zero, evenings that turned into work because there was always one more thing.

I thought that was what mattering looked like.

Back when I was practicing law, there was a stretch where I was working late into the night most nights, telling myself the volume of it meant I was valuable. That if I wasn't stretched thin, I wasn't doing enough.

The moment that changed was smaller than I expected.

I missed something with the people I loved. Nothing dramatic, just one more thing I said no to because work came first.
And I remember sitting there afterward, exhausted, calendar still full, and realizing none of it had actually made me feel important. It had just made me tired.

Busy was never the same thing as important. I just hadn't sat still long enough to notice the difference.

I see the same pattern in almost every high performer I talk to now. Full calendar, empty tank, and no idea the two things aren't actually connected.

Have you ever ended a busy week and felt more tired than accomplished?

I used to believe rest was something you earned after the work was done.So I kept pushing the finish line further away.B...
23/07/2026

I used to believe rest was something you earned after the work was done.

So I kept pushing the finish line further away.

Back when I was practicing law, I worked late into the night more nights than not. I told myself that was just what the job required. That the client work, the deadlines, the pressure to prove I belonged in the room, all of it mattered more than sleep.

Looking back, almost everything I believed about rest was wrong.

1) I thought sleep was time I was losing.

Every hour asleep felt like an hour I could've spent getting ahead.
Turns out it was the opposite. I wasn't losing time, I was borrowing against a version of myself that would have to pay it back later, with interest.

2) I thought I could run on empty and still show up for the people I love.

I was physically there. But nowhere close to present. I'd snap at people over nothing.
Friends stopped inviting me to things because I always said no, until they stopped asking.

3) I thought exhaustion was proof I was serious about the work.

It wasn't proof of anything except how far I'd drifted from what actually mattered.

That version of burnout is exactly why I do the work I do now.

I recently had the chance to speak on exactly this, how to identify burnout in the leaders around you before it gets to the point I let it get to.

Is burnout something that's actually talked about openly where you work, or is it still the thing everyone pushes through quietly?

Cybersecurity is an “always on” pressure cooker, and the people defending our digital world are carrying far more than t...
21/07/2026

Cybersecurity is an “always on” pressure cooker, and the people defending our digital world are carrying far more than technical responsibility.

I had such a thoughtful conversation with Bronwyn Boyle, FCIISEC on the podcast about a topic that deserves so much more attention: the human side of cybersecurity leadership and what burnout is costing the people we rely on to keep organisations safe.

We talked about the pressure of being the person everyone turns to when something goes wrong, why CISOs and security teams are often expected to absorb constant stress without showing the strain, and how psychological safety becomes essential when the stakes are high.

Because cyber resilience is not only about systems, controls, incident response, and governance.

It is also about the humans behind the screens.

The people making decisions under pressure.
The people holding risk for the organisation.
The people expected to stay calm when everyone else is escalating.

I loved this conversation with Bronwyn because it brought together cybersecurity, leadership, burnout prevention, and the very real emotional load of working in a field where the work never truly switches off.

You can listen to the full episode here: https://charlenegisele.com/podcast/fintech-cybersecurity-leadership-the-ciso-guide-to-preventing-burnout/

20/07/2026

How would you know you're burnt out when you're too busy to notice?

You get the title. The salary. The seat at the table you used to dream about.

And somewhere in the middle of all that winning, your body starts sending signals you don't have time to listen to.

You can't sleep even when you're exhausted.
You snap with people you actually love.
You get through the day on caffeine and adrenaline and call it discipline.
You hit the goal and feel nothing for about a day before you're already chasing the next one.

That's burnout.

And it doesn't look like falling apart. It looks like still winning while quietly running on empty.

Most people think this is just the cost of getting somewhere.

It's not. The people who sustain success for decades caught this early and changed how they work before their body forced the change for them.

That shift is possible, and it's simpler than you'd think.

So the real question isn't whether you're heading toward burnout. It's whether you'd even recognize it if you were already in it.

I didn't recognise I was burnt out when I was in the middle of it.

Part of it was denial. Part of it was being far too busy to stop and ask what was really going on. But mostly, I simply didn't know the signs and symptoms.

That's exactly why I created this quiz for you.

It takes less than three minutes to complete and will give you a clearer picture of whether burnout may be affecting you, along with practical next steps: https://4db9-coach.systeme.io/6ad5c8b6

29/06/2026

Right now, someone is Googling you.

Maybe it is a potential client. Maybe it is a referral from someone you met last month. Maybe it is the decision maker you have been trying to reach for months.

And the first thing they are going to find is your LinkedIn profile.

The question is, what are they going to think when they do?

An outdated photo. A bio written in third person that sounds like it was copied from a conference programme. A headline that says absolutely nothing about what you actually do or who you do it for.

And just like that, the opportunity is gone. Not because you are not good enough. Because your profile did not show them that you are.

Steve Bruce has been training professionals on LinkedIn since 2011 and using it since the day it launched in 2003. He has reviewed thousands of profiles and he knows within seconds exactly what is costing people business.

In this episode, we explore:
- Why visibility feels uncomfortable for high achievers
- Who you are actually performing for when you hold back
- What your clients actually need to see before they call you
- How to show up clearly without ever feeling like you are selling

Comment EP128 and I will send this conversation straight to your DMs.

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