From Corporate Burnout to Comedy: Rewriting the Beliefs That Keep You Overloaded

Most conversations about corporate burnout stop at the symptoms: exhaustion, disengagement, dashboards that still look "green" while people quietly check out. This episode goes underneath that — to the beliefs that keep capable women absorbing responsibility long before burnout ever shows up on paper. Dr. Natalie Luke sits down with comedian, speaker, and certified emotional intelligence expert Merit Kahn — creator of the one-woman show Optimistic Personality Disorder — for a conversation that started as a talk about rewriting your personal story and turned into something bigger: a look at how the beliefs we inherit and the systems we work in quietly conspire to overload the same people, over and over. Merit calls them hand-me-down beliefs. Natalie calls it the Trust Tax. Same weight, different language — and once you can see both at once, corporate burnout starts to look less like a personal failing and more like a routing problem with a belief system attached. In this episode: • Why "if I can fix it, I should" is doing more damage than any single overloaded week • The difference between a belief you inherited and a belief that's actually true • How role responsibility, outcome responsibility, and emotional/systemic responsibility get tangled — and why untangling them is the first step out of corporate burnout • A simple five-minute reset you can do today to sort what's actually yours to carry • The backstory behind Natalie and Merit's new live event, Rewrite Your Story, coming to Detroit this October About Merit Kahn: Merit Kahn is a comedian, speaker, and certified emotional intelligence expert whose one-woman show, Optimistic Personality Disorder, turns divorce, cancer, narcissists, and empty nesting into a lens for rewriting your own story. Find her at merit.com and opdshow.com. Resources mentioned: • Take the Trust Tax Diagnostic (free, 5 minutes): Click Here! (https://unceilingzone.com/trust_tax_d...) • Rewrite Your Story — live event with Natalie & Merit, Detroit, October 2026: Get Tickets (https://zfrmz.com/es9vLZJgRIUPLbTLHabV) • Merit Kahn: merit.com | opdshow.com (https://meritkahn.com/theater/) Send us Fan Mail (https://www.buzzsprout.com/2445948/fa...) https://unceilingzone.com/rwys https://unceilingzone.com/rwys UnCeiling Your Career: At Any Age Book (https://www.amazon.com/UnCeiling-Your...) 📘 UnCeiling Your Career — At Any Age helps you battle self-doubt, build strategic plans, and keep a Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you. Support the show (https://www.buzzsprout.com/2445948/su...) Learn More at https://unceilingzone.com