The Burnout Trap: From "What's Wrong With Me?" to a New Career

In this episode, Sarah talks with the "marvellous" Paul Bridel, a coach who shares his powerful and personal journey from a 20-year career in IT to a complete breakdown from burnout.

Paul opens up about his multi-year struggle in a project management role, where he lost all his energy, confidence, and desire to be at his job. He describes the awful feeling of being trapped —too exhausted and lacking the self-belief to even go through a job search.

This conversation is a must-listen for any professional who feels stuck, hopeless, or is asking themselves, "What's wrong with me?".

Paul explains how he finally found coaching and turned his "great experience" of burnout into a new mission.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Paul's Background: Paul spent two decades in IT, moving from support to project management. In the late 2000s, he began to burn out from the workload and pressure.

• The Burnout Trap: He shares the experience of being stuck in a loop of no energy and no confidence. The worst part was this sense of being trapped, believing he couldn't get another job and not having the energy to try.

• Discovering Coaching: Paul found coaching while devouring self-help books and after receiving some counselling. He was drawn to coaching's forward-looking approach, but he never actually hired a coach himself.

• The Long Road: Paul believes that if he had hired a coach, he would have "sorted himself out" much more quickly. Instead, it took him "years and years" to make progress on his own. He eventually left his job after being offered redundancy.

• The Stigma of Struggling: Paul and Sarah discuss why highly conscientious people with a strong sense of duty are often hit the hardest. In competitive corporate environments, people are afraid to be seen as "the one that's struggling" , which leads to isolation, loneliness , and a sense of shame.

  
  

• His New Book: Paul is writing a book based on his experience, with the working title "What's Wrong With Me". It's the book he wishes he'd had , written to help people in the thick of burnout understand what's happening to them and to show them that they are not broken.

• • Book Release: The book is planned for release by the end of October, and "definitely before Christmas".

  
  

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In this candid episode, Sarah explores a peculiar and frustrating challenge she has encountered repeatedly after years of running The Coaching Revolution: highly intelligent coaches are often the most difficult to teach.

While it's reasonable to assume brilliant minds would be quick to implement proven strategies, Sarah reveals that the opposite is often true. She explains how intelligence, when combined with professional success, can create the most stubborn barrier to learning. This episode is a must-listen for any coach who prides themselves on their intellect but finds themselves struggling to get results.

In this episode, you will learn:

• The Paradox of Intelligence: Why the assumption that highly intelligent individuals are easier to work with is "entirely wrong". Their advanced education and success often create a "stubborn barrier to learning".

  
  

• The "Special Case" Syndrome: How highly intelligent coaches resist new strategies. They don't question the methodology directly; instead, they "claim exemption", insisting their situation and their potential clients are special cases where the normal rules don't apply.

  
  

• Ego and Counter-Intuition: The resistance often stems from the "uncomfortable collision between intelligence and ego". Effective marketing can feel "counterintuitive" or simply "wrong", causing analytical minds to retreat into exceptionalism.

  
  

• The Power of Peer Validation: Why breakthroughs for intelligent coaches rarely come from expert instruction. The resistance only disappears when they engage with other highly intelligent professionals in a community who validate the process. Hearing from a peer carries more weight than instruction from a teacher.

  
  

• The High Cost of Resistance: Coaches who remain convinced they are special cases consistently fail, not because the teaching doesn't work, but because they won't implement it properly. They become their own biggest obstacle.

  
  

• The Path to Success: The most successful outcomes happen when intelligent coaches "temporarily suspend their need to understand why something works before they try it". True progress comes when they show humility and accept that brilliance in one field doesn't automatically translate to expertise in another.

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Ever wonder why so many talented, qualified coaches have empty client lists? In this episode, Sarah Short, founder of The Coaching Revolution, tackles this question head-on, starting with the principle that inspired her nearly eight-year journey: Simon Sinek's "Start with Why."

Sarah gets personal, sharing the "why" behind The Coaching Revolution's mission: to transform passionate, qualified coaches into well-paid professionals by fixing the single biggest obstacle they face. This episode is a must-listen for any coach who feels frustrated with client acquisition and is ready to build a real, sustainable business.

In this episode, you will learn:

• The Coaching Revolution's "Why": The organisation was founded to bridge the gap between skilled coaches and genuine, paid coaching opportunities. Its vision is to empower coaches who have been transformed by coaching to have a positive impact on others.

  
  

• The Non-Negotiable Standard: The Coaching Revolution only works with coaches who have completed 60+ hours of specific training. Sarah explains that many people who believe they've been "coaching informally" for years are actually mentoring, a critical distinction they discover after formal training.

  
  

• The Core Problem in the Industry: Most coaches don't lack skill; they lack clients. The fundamental reason is that coaches are notoriously bad at explaining the benefits of what they do in simple, accessible language. They use industry jargon like "co-creating environments" and "thinking partner," which means nothing to potential clients and can even sound patronising.

  
  

• A Broken System: The competition for clients is so fierce that many coaches work for platforms that don't pay them, in exchange for "community" or supervision. Sarah critiques the industry practice of logging hours that are "paid in inverted commas"—meaning an exchange of value like a cup of coffee, not actual money—which allows this to happen.

  
  

• • The Solution - Building the Bridge: The key to getting clients is learning how to articulate the problems you solve in words that are intelligible to non-coaches. The Coaching Revolution teaches coaches how to have conversations that demonstrate empathy and offer hope, building trust long before a contract is ever signed.

  
  

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