The Fuel Behind Your Behaviour: Why Stress and Burnout Follow You — Even When You Change Jobs
During my corporate career, I attended countless professional development seminars and workshops. Many of them were genuinely valuable — helping me understand my leadership style, my communication preferences, and my personality type. These insights gave me useful frameworks to work within. They gave me the language for how I interacted with others and frameworks for how to lead effectively.
But for me, there was always a missing piece.
None of them addressed the “why” behind my behaviour — the deeper drivers shaping how I showed up, how I felt, and ultimately, how I experienced my work.
It wasn’t until I began to understand my unconscious patterns, beliefs, and habits that everything shifted. Once I could identify the internal forces driving my actions, I was able to step into my roles with far greater confidence and control. I became less reactive, more intentional, and better able to apply the leadership tools I’d learned with real impact.
The reason?
I had learned to identify whether the “fuel” behind my actions was coming from a place of confidence and control — or from fear and frustration. The former is sustainable and fulfilling. The latter almost always leads to stress, burnout, and disengagement.
The New York Lesson
I understood this lesson most clearly when I moved to New York. Before the move, I had experienced my share of stress and burnout in corporate roles and believed it was because of the type of work I was doing.
While searching for a corporate role in New York, I took a temporary job working behind a bar — something I hadn’t done since my university days. I enjoyed the banter, the pace, and the novelty. And yet, in the evenings, I would find myself worrying that someone might leave a bad Yelp review.
That was the moment it clicked: my stress wasn’t being caused by the work itself. It was coming from me — from my own patterns, beliefs, and habits. Even in a role that meant very little to me in the long term, I was recreating the same stress responses I’d had in corporate life.
This was when I understood the truth behind the saying: you take yourself with you.
Why Changing Jobs Rarely Solves the Problem
When people feel stressed, overwhelmed, or burnt out, they often point to external factors — their workload, their boss, the team culture, even the industry itself. And yes, in certain situations, the workplace is genuinely toxic and a change is warranted. But in my experience, those cases are fewer than most people think.
More often, the real source of stress is what we are making our job and our performance mean about us.
When your sense of self-worth is tied to your role, your primal brain interprets every challenge, every setback, and every piece of feedback as a threat to your survival. This is what drives the anxiety, the perfectionism, the constant pressure to do more.
That’s why, if you’re feeling burnt out in one role, simply changing jobs often only provides temporary relief. The patterns that led you to burnout in the first place — the ones quietly running in the background — will likely come with you.
The Fuel Behind the Action
This is why understanding your internal drivers is so critical. When you know what is fuelling your behaviour, you can start to see whether your actions are being powered by grounded confidence or by fear and self-doubt.
Over the years, I’ve seen the same core patterns appear again and again in high-achieving professionals — unconscious beliefs that shape how they respond to work. For example:
The need to prove your worth through constant over-delivery.
The belief that keeping the peace is more important than speaking up.
The drive to maintain impossible standards of perfection.
The compulsion to be the one who holds everything together.
When these patterns run unchecked, they become the silent engine behind stress and burnout. They determine how you interpret challenges, how you interact with others, and how much pressure you place on yourself — often without you realising it.
Doing the Work Where You Are
That’s why, when clients come to me feeling burnt out, my first recommendation is not necessarily to leave their job. Instead, we start by uncovering and working with their internal drivers while they remain in their current role.
Because when you address those patterns — when you shift the fuel behind your behaviour — you change the way you experience work. You make decisions from a place of control rather than reactivity. You stop pouring energy into unhelpful cycles. And you can finally use all those leadership tools, time management strategies, and communication frameworks in a way that is sustainable and fulfilling.
The result is a shift from reactive coping to purposeful, values-based leadership. Your work becomes energising rather than depleting, and you performance becomes a reflection of your strengths rather than a measure of your work.
So whether you ultimately stay in your current company or move on to something new, you’ll do it from a place of choice — not escape. And that makes all the difference.
