43: The 7 Archetypes That May Be Keeping You Stuck in Burnout Cycles

When you know whether these burnout-archetypes are running point in your life it gives you the power to create change.  

If you’ve ever wondered why you keep hitting burnout even when you “know better”, or why, no matter how many times you promise yourself you’ll slow down, set better boundaries, or stop overcommitting… you somehow end up right back feeling stretched too thin, this episode is for you.

There are unconscious patterns running in the background of your life, shaping how you show up, how you work, and how you push yourself beyond your limits.They’re strategies you picked up along the way to feel safe, loved, and successful. And they worked very well at some point in your life but now they are just keeping you trapped.

What we cover in this episode:

• Why these archetypes form and why they feel so normal
• How they get wired into your nervous system
• How they show up in your life (and business)
• Why mindset work and affirmations aren’t enough to create change, and what actually works

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Transcript

I've just come off a call where we discussed one of the most important and valuable things that I believe you can use as you are making your way to building a business and a life that is free from burnout. So many of the things that we assume is part of our personality might actually just be a habit. It is a success strategy and role and archetype that you have adopted to be successful and to achieve certain results in your life, but that is not who you are. So that's what I want to share with you in today's episode because it is going to be so helpful if you are standing at a point in your life where you know need to make a change. You are not prepared to carry on the way that you have been. You're done with being exhausted, with being spread so thin, with not trusting yourself to make those bold moves because the self-doubt is too loud in your head. 

And when we have an awareness of how these archetypes are playing out in our lives, we have the power to make a change. So welcome and you are listening to the Beyond Burnout for Driven Women Podcast where we end the cycle of burnout so you can feel more balanced, clear and in control of your life if you are a high achiever ready to move past overwhelm, overthinking and overdrive, and instead drop down into your body so you can start living full out, you are in the right spot. Let's dive in. So at the core, these archetypes aren't who you truly are, right? I need you to remember that this is a protective strategy that you have developed to keep you safe, to secure love, to make you feel like you belong. And while this have paid off, you might have realised that instead of keeping you safe, this is keeping you trapped in cycles of burnout, in cycles of over-delivering and in cycles of not showing up as that fullest version of yourself. 

And it might be helpful to pause a little bit and just dive into surface level, how the nervous system plays a role in this early conditioning of us. If we learn from a young age that our achievements and those things that are perceived that we do well, if that brings us love, it strengthens the neural pathways that starts making this overworking over-delivering this striving, this pushing. It starts making that feel very natural. And we take that with us into our grownup life. And for most of us, we are living in a society that rewards this overing, the self-sacrifice. And if we then also get praised for holding it all together, this becomes our default setting. I'm sure we all know of at least one woman. If this is not you, it might be someone in your life that everybody speaks about as she is such a strong woman and it doesn't matter what happens and what experiences she has, all the situations in her life, she's so strong and she's just, she keeps it all together and she just handles everything. 

So there is a big acknowledgement when we see this kind of behaviour in other women. If you are going to always be rewarded and recognised and acknowledged for keeping it all together, can you see how this then becomes part of your identity? And this is just one small example of an archetype playing out. So I'm going to take you through these archetypes now, and what I would love for you to do is as I go through them, I invite you to see which of these archetypes are playing out in your life. Which ones do you recognise? And you might find that there is a little bit of all of them or there's one that's particularly prevalent for you. And the thing is here when you recognise this, when you begin to see how these adaptations that we have, these survival adaptations, how they are playing out in the background, when you have the awareness of that, it gives you the power to begin to change it. 

You cannot change that which you are not aware of. So the very first archetype is the one of the mother, and the mother is the archetype that is the one who takes care of everyone else's needs. She is the one that carries the weight of the world on her shoulders because she believes that if she stops holding it all together, everything will fall apart. So if this is a role that you take on, you might be seen as someone who is very competent and very capable. You anticipate anything or any problems before they actually happen and you're hyper reliable. People know that they can on you, but on the back end, why this leads to burnout is because it can leave you feeling that you are trapped in responsibility. It's a big weight to carry on your shoulders if everyone is relying on you. And if you believe that without you holding it all together and keeping it all on point, things are going to fall apart. 

So not only do women who embody this mothering role start feeling resentful because everyone is relying on them, but they also don't trust that the people in their lives can do it for themselves. The next archetype is the dynamo, which really presents itself as someone who has a whole lot of energy and almost like that energizer bunny, but she keeps on running into walls. She measures her worth by her output. This is definitely an archetype that I think will be so familiar for many of us because of the world that we live in that has taught us and conditioned us to equate our worth to our output. The world makes us believe that our worth can always only be found outside of ourselves. And when we do that, we giving our power away. We are not standing solidly in the truth of who we are. 

So if you embody this dynamo energy, if this is a role that plays out in your life, typically you have the unconscious idea that if you slow down, you'll lose momentum if you stop moving. So a really lighthearted example of this is when you come back from holiday and there are so many things to unpack and you need to sort out the house again and you need to do the laundry and you need to get the kids ready for school the next day. So there are so many tasks and you are pumping, you are just moving forward and it's like your whole body, your whole being is vibrating at an extremely high pace and you have the sense that you're going to collapse if you stop. So you just have to keep on moving. And I have found myself in that space more than once. 

And so the power, again, here is the awareness, and this is also often when this archetype is running point in our lives. You would also notice it's those moments where you wish secretly that you would fall ill, that you would get a cold, nothing too serious, but just something that is enough to give you that permission to actually just slow down. And we really need to learn to give ourselves the permission that we need over here. The next archetype is the peacekeeper. So many of us have a natural inclination to having harmony as one of our strengths. It is where we want to bring harmony and grace and fairness into all of the interactions with the people in our lives. And that is a beautiful trait to have for sure. And sometimes this can veer over to the side of not really supporting us when we start getting dopamine hits every time we get acknowledged for going that extra mile. 

Now, this peacekeeper is someone who prioritises keeping everyone else happy despite her own needs. And if this is an archetype that is prevalent in your life, you also might find that it is difficult for you to say yes or no to draw your boundaries because you don't want to upset the apple cart. You avoid conflict because you want to be liked and there's nothing wrong with us wanting to be liked, but can you see how it becomes a problem if you are abandoning yourself in the process? The peacekeeper is also really prevalent in our lives if we say we don't want to stand out too much. We don't want to risk being judged or criticised when people see us. So you are always going to make sure that other people are comfortable and supported first. You are very good in building strong relationships and trust with people and you are very adaptable and accommodating. 

So those are all very beautiful traits that come out when we embody this peacekeeper archetype. But when you struggle to take up space and claim what you desire and claim what you need and ask for that, can you see how this can possibly put you in that state of feeling resentful, feeling maybe even like a victim in your own life where you are not empowered to go after that which you truly truly want for yourself? The next archetype is one that I'm very familiar with, and that is the weaver. So the weaver is that archetype that Wes very intricate plans, and so often the weaver is so focused on having these plans materialise in a certain way, and she's very controlling that it's very hard for her to let it unfold naturally. So the weaver really believes that flawless execution is the answer. So you might find that you spend so much time refining and perfecting things that you waste time doing that. 

So you might sit and reread an email that you want to send five times before you actually just send it. You might agonise about a certain project and you spend a lot of energy and a lot of time up in your trying to figure it out mentally, and it's really hard for you to move forward until it's perfect. This is the dynamic that we get caught up if we have all of these products that we want to launch, but we never get to launching them because they are not perfect. And I always think about the example of having all of these ideas in your head, but you never take them out and test them in the world. And if you are in business, you know that the only way to go forward is to experiment and to test so that you can have that feedback from your audience to refine and to improve your product or your service, whatever that is. 

So we have to take it out of our heads. The weaver is definitely very, very good when it comes to paying attention to detail and you produce high quality work. So there is a lot of competence in whatever it is that you do. But when this becomes a mal adaption, when you're stuck in the survival side of this weaver archetype, it stops you from taking risks, even calculated risks. Where I see this weaver play out especially is in business where I don't want to use the term work-life balance because to me it always implies that there's a perfect recipe. This is what work-life balance should look like when in fact the whole work-life balance thing is a little bit of a fallacy because it doesn't exist. And that's food for another podcast. I'll definitely make another podcast about that. But the weaver doesn't have much free time because her work expands to take up all of the available time that she has, whether she's in her office or not. 

So even in her free time, it takes up space in her mind and in her energy because this perfectionism is slowing her down. This next archetype is one that I have also seen play out in my life over and over again, and I've really done some deep embodiment work in terms of releasing these patterns in my own life. And that is the archetype of the fortress, the silo, the one that fights all her battles alone even when she doesn't have to. So when this is active in your life, you see asking help as a weakness. So you are going to avoid sharing with anyone the struggles that you are going through. You're always going to put on a brave face. You're always going to pretend that everything is hunky dory, and in the background you are drowning. The fortress also tends to believe and you can check for yourself whether this is true or not. 

She also tends to believe that the reason that she has to do it all by herself is because no one will show up for her and she can't let people in. She can't let people see what is really going on. And this was one of the biggest adaptations that I got stuck in, which led to my burnout. And specifically because I wanted to do everything on my own and I didn't tell anyone about how I was struggling behind the scenes. I just continued to push myself more and more and try and make it on my own. And of course, we all know how that worked out. So if this is active in your life, one of the best antidotes is to find a community of women that you can connect with so that you can begin to develop those muscles of trusting and leaning into the support of community. 

I have two more archetypes that I want to take you through. The next one is the shapeshifter, and I see that there is some correlation between the shapeshifter and the peacekeeper. The shapeshifter is also someone who values harmony and she will always adjust herself to what people want from her. So she's like a little bit of a chameleon. If this is active in your life, then you will notice that you tend to shape yourself to fit the expectations of others instead of fully owning who you are and showing up as that fully expressed version of yourself. And if this is a familiar role to you, you'll know that it has been very helpful because it helped you navigate difficult circumstances. It's easy for you to blend in, you don't raffle any feathers and you know how to read a room. So you're very good at meeting the expectations of others. 

The problem again that comes in when this becomes a male adaption is that you feel disconnected from your own identity and you feel disconnected from your own desires. You don't know what you want anymore because you have given so much of yourself to others in the sense of always changing who you are. You are morphing into what others want instead of standing fully in yourself. And at this point, again, I don't want this to feel like any kind of judgement  if this is an archetype that you are very familiar with because all of your early conditioning together with a world that we are living in today makes it easy for us to fall into these roles. These are success strategies, and I'm putting success strategies in quote here because they are not truly success strategies, but they have helped you get to where you are now until they don't work anymore. 

So they shape your identity. The problem is if you have built your entire sense of self-worth and your identity around any one of these archetypes, it becomes very difficult to just through mindset work or affirmations or even willpower, it becomes very difficult to change that. I would say almost impossible unless you have lots of years to do this over a period of time. The quickest way to break free from any of these adaptations, from any of these archetypes is through embodiment, through fully inhabiting yourself. So let me share with you the final archetype. And the final archetype is the grinder. And again, the world that we live in conditions us and socialises us to see and believe that the grinder, the one who puts her shoulder to the wheel, no matter how difficult it is, never give up. Just do it, face your fears and do it anyway. 

We have all of these slogans, so we end up believing that this is how it should be. If you want to have a successful business, you have to put in the sweat and the tears and the hours. And yes, of course, if you are building your own business in the early years, there is some sweat and there is some hustle. But I think the difference comes in in how you are resourced while you are in the space of building your own business, while you are in the space of creating the life in the business that you want, and scaling that, taking that to the next level. So if you are not going to be resourced, then the grind is going to burn you out. If you are resourced, if you've got the tools available to support your nervous system, to support your soul, to feed you from the inside so that you have the capacity to stand in this space of grinding for bursts of time, it becomes a completely different ball game. 

So the grinder also tends to believe that success should feel hard, otherwise it doesn't count. And you might recognise this if you tend to dismiss or not value those things that come easy to because of this underlying belief that says, if I don't bleed over this, if I don't break out into sweat and tears, it means that it isn't really so valuable. You don't see your own gifts. Everyone can do this. What's special about what I can do? So I'm going to pause us here for a moment just so that you have some time to reflect over these archetypes that I've just taken you through. So the mother archetype, the dynamo, the peacekeeper, the weaver, the fortress, the shapeshifter and the grinder. So these seven archetypes and reflect on how any of these might be showing up in your life. I said at this top of the episode, it's so important for us to recognise when these archetypes are playing out in our life because it's critical if we want to build a sustainable business and a sustainable life. 

Let's be honest, most of us or everyone that I know of, we start our own businesses because we are looking for freedom, whether it's time freedom, whether it's financial freedom, whether it's freedom to be more with our family, freedom to go and travel. And yet I know of many women, and I'm raising my hand here because this used to be me as well, where I worked harder in my business than what I did in my corporate job. And again, there are seasons in your life where you are going to be busier in your business. The thing is, you can't create a sustainable life from a burnt out nervous system. And even if you are not in full burnout, even if you on the other side of burnout, or even if you are someone who skirts the edges of burnout, you always pull yourself back just before it's too late. 

Your body has been wired for stress and you need to consciously rewire it. And that's why what I mean when I say that visualisation and mindset work and affirmations aren't enough, we need to work on the level of the body. You need to discover how to inhabit yourself. When you inhabit yourself, you come into full self-expression in all areas of your life. I'm going to leave you with a final reflection question. And the question is, ask yourself and I operating from survival, or am I operating from my genius, that space where I am fully inhabiting myself, where I'm fully self-expressed and I don't shrink or hide or contract myself anymore, but instead I'm showing up as the fullest, boldest version of myself? I hope that you have found this episode helpful. If you have, then I'd love to hear about it. So you can screenshot this episode and tag me on Instagram. 

Also share this episode with a friend who needs to hear it. And then if you are feeling generous, I would so appreciate it if you could leave me a rating and review. It's super, super easy. If you are on listening on iTunes on Apple, then just scroll to the bottom of the episode. There are five little stars. Click on hopefully star number five, and you can also leave a short review. And if you listening on Spotify, you can leave a rating. So go to the page, my page, beyond Burnout for Driven Women in the Spotify app. Tap on the three dots and select rate show. That's a wrap. Thank you so much for joining me today. I.