What a Paediatrician's Office Taught Me About Corporate Burnout

4 days ago
9 min read

"I spent twenty years in corporate environments sitting through leadership development workshops about emotional intelligence and resilience. Nobody ever told me what those things were actually built from. I had to find that out in a paediatrician's office at forty-two years old."

When my son was diagnosed with ADHD, his paediatrician said something I wasn't expecting. She told me this had less to do with fixing him and more to do with educating me as his parent. She handed me a book. I went home, read it cover to cover, and then kept going, into Harvard Medical Journals, into research papers, into every resource I could find.

And somewhere in that reading, a light went on that I have never been able to turn off ever since.

The Skills Nobody Told Us About

The first time I heard the words executive functioning skills I thought they were something clinical. Something reserved for kids with diagnoses and the specialists who treated them. I had no idea that these nine skills are the operating system running underneath every single human being with a brain. Not just children with ADHD. Not just high achievers or people in therapy. Every person. Including me. Including you.

Here is what stopped me cold on my own journey: I'd spent the better part of two decades in corporate life learning about emotional intelligence, resilience, leadership presence. Those workshops talked about the outcomes. Nobody ever taught me the skills that actually produce those outcomes. Executive functioning skills are the stepladder that gets you there. They were sitting underneath everything I'd ever been trained on, and not one course, not one facilitator, not one leadership program had ever named them.

"Emotional intelligence is the outcome. Executive functioning skills are the stepladder that gets you there. We have been teaching the destination without ever teaching the route."

As I kept reading, I started seeing these skills everywhere. In myself. In my husband. In my colleagues and the teams I was training. In the burnout I'd been living through in real time, working through grief, managing a neurodivergent child, carrying a full corporate load, wondering why I felt like I was constantly running at a deficit no matter how hard I worked.

The answer wasn't that I needed to work harder or think more positively. The answer was that nobody had ever taught me how to train the skills my brain actually needed to sustain what life was asking of me.

The Nine Skills

So what are these skills? Think of them as an orchestra. Each one plays a distinct role. When they are all working together you may not even notice them. When one section goes quiet, the whole performance suffers.

According to The Center of the Developing Child at Harvard University, these nine skills are a stronger predictor of your ability to thrive in life than academic achievement. Read that again. Not grades. Not IQ. Not credentials. These skills.

01 Self-Awareness

What it is: The ability to accurately read your own internal state in real time. Not who you think you are. Who you actually are right now, in this moment, under this level of load. When this skill is strong you can feel depletion before it becomes a crisis. When it's depleted you plan for your best-day self while running on your worst-day capacity and wonder why nothing feels sustainable.

02 Self-Monitoring

What it is: The ability to observe your own behaviour and its impact on others in real time. Not in hindsight. In the moment. When this skill is strong you can read the room, adjust mid-conversation, and catch yourself before you say the thing you will likely regret. When it's depleted you leave meetings unsure whether you came across the way you intended, and you find out later that you did not.

03 Emotional Regulation

What it is: The ability to move through an emotional wave without being swept away by it. This isn't by any means suppression of your emotions! It's not performing calm while silently drowning, but rather the skill of feeling what you feel and still being able to choose your response. When this skill is depleted you absorb everyone else's stress, snap at people you respect, say yes to things you have no capacity to hold, and cry in the car on the way home.

04 Impulse Control

What it is: The ability to pause between stimulus and response. That gap, however small, is where your best decisions live. When this skill is strong, you think before you hit send. When it's depleted you send the email at 11pm that you regret by morning, make commitments from guilt rather than capacity, and speak before you have finished thinking.

05 Working Memory

What it is: The ability to hold information in your mind and work with it in real time. Your brain is not a filing cabinet. Working memory is the active desk space where thinking happens. When it's overloaded, nothing gets finished properly because you're trying to hold too many things at once. Chronic overload looks like forgetfulness, distraction, and a constant sense of spinning without landing.

06 Cognitive Flexibility

What it is: The ability to shift perspective, adapt to new information, and genuinely consider viewpoints other than your own. Not as a performance. As a practice. This is the skill that chronic stress and age hardens fastest. Under sustained pressure, the brain narrows. Digging in feels like conviction. It is usually rigidity. When this skill is strong you lead with curiosity. When it's depleted, change feels like a threat.

07 Task Initiation

What it is: The ability to begin. Not to be motivated. Not to feel ready. To start. This skill fails most visibly under conditions of overwhelm, perfectionism, or ambiguity. It's consistently misread as procrastination or laziness. It's neither, but rather a brain skill under load, and the right intervention depends entirely on understanding what specific barrier is causing the stuck.

08 Planning and Prioritization

What it is: The ability to sequence what matters, in realistic order, calibrated to your actual capacity on a given day. Not your ideal capacity. Your actual capacity. Most people plan aspirationally. The to-do list is written for the best version of a day that never arrives. Decision fatigue sets in by early afternoon. Reactive mode becomes the permanent operating system.

09 Goal-Directed Persistence

What it is: The ability to stay the course when motivation has left the building. Motivation gets you started. This skill keeps you moving through the weeks when nothing feels like progress and everything feels like resistance. It's the skill most likely to erode without external accountability and the one most commonly mistaken for a character flaw when it depletes.

What This Costs Women Specifically

These skills deplete in every human being under sustained load. But I want to talk here specifically about what this costs women at different stages of their lives and careers, because we carry it differently. And we carry it silently. I did for 5 years and know I'm not alone in that.

Early Career

You're hungry, ambitious, willing to outwork anyone in the room. You have something to prove and you are proving it. The hours are long and you're doing them gladly because you can see the prospects ahead. What nobody tells you is that hustle without a cognitive fitness foundation has a ceiling. The burnout rate for younger professionals is rising, not because the work ethic is gone but because the foundational skills were never taught. The capacity to sustain the grind was never built.

Mid-Career

You got the promotion. You bought the house. Maybe you got married, had a child, took on a mortgage. Now you're navigating the ambitious career you built alongside a domestic life that nobody prepared you for either because the world is faster and demands more than the generations of working women before us. The mental load doubles and then doubles again. If you lost a parent during this window, grief sits on top of everything else. If your child has a challenge, you are managing that quietly too. You look capable from the outside. Inside, you are running the most complex operation of your life with no instruction manual and no recovery time built in.

Senior Leadership

Now you're the one the organization is counting on. University tuition. Aging parents. A marriage that has required constant renegotiation over two decades. Perimenopause, which nobody in a boardroom wants to talk about, but which has a documented neurological impact on the very skills we're discussing here. You're carrying your team's capacity as well as your own. You have earned every room you are in. And you're doing it on a foundation that was never built to last this long without maintenance.

"I was on medical leave for stress-related heart issues when I was laid off. I wasn't the first on my team to go down. I wasn't the only woman (this happened to men too) and I wasn't the last. Nobody saw it coming. The warning signs were always there in the skills nobody taught any of us to track."

We carry all of this silently because speaking up feels like a risk at every stage. When you're junior, you don't want to be seen as someone who can't handle the pressure this early on. When you're mid-career, you just got promoted and you have to prove you deserve it and can manage it. When you're senior, you were put in that room for a reason and you're not about to be the story of the woman who could not hack it.

So we carry it. Until we no longer can and we end up shutting down. We end up silently quitting, actively leaving, ending up on medical leaves or worse.

What a Practice Actually Looks Like

I want to be clear about something. This is not a wellness conversation. I've been too practical in my own life to subscribe to that narrative. This is a performance conversation. The same way you wouldn't walk into a marathon without training for it, you can't walk into perimenopause, or a promotion, or grief, or an AI upskill, or change management without a cognitive fitness practice already in place. By the time the wave arrives it is too late to start building the muscle.

A daily cognitive fitness practice doesn't require an hour. It requires consistency across four windows in your day.

In the morning, before you pick up your phone: 60 seconds. What's my energy level today, honestly? What am I carrying? What do I need to protect? Write down three priorities only. Not a to-do list. A filter for the day.

Throughout the day: Move your body first when you feel regulation slipping. It's the fastest reset available to you. A physiological sigh works anywhere: double inhale, long slow exhale. Cold water on your face resets your nervous system in seconds. Three breaths before responding to anything high-stakes. Once a day, deliberately consider the opposite of your first instinct and flex that cognitive flexibility muscle. It doesn't mean you have to agree or change sides, just intentionally consider it.

At transitions between tasks: Leave one sentence for future-you before you close anything. Where did I stop? What's the next step? This eliminates the reactivation cost that eats so much of the day.

In the evening: 3 things that went well in how you showed up, not just what you accomplished. One thing you actively decide to put down until tomorrow. Name it. Set it aside. Prepare tomorrow-you, so the loops do not run overnight.

These practices are learnable. They're also where self-practice hits its natural ceiling. Because most of the skills I described above require external calibration to develop accurately. You can't see your own blind spots. You can't rehearse regulation under pressure alone. You can't build a planning system calibrated to your actual capacity, without someone outside your head helping you see the gap between what you think you can hold and what you are actually holding.

That's not a failure of discipline. This is how the beautiful human brain works. And it's exactly why the village matters.

The goal isn't a different version of you. It's a reclamation of the one already here. Same woman. Same life. But the gap between how you look and how you actually are, starts to close. You lead from regulation, not reaction. You make decisions from discernment, not depletion. You are sustainable, and most importantly, for yourself as a human. That is the definition of putting on your own oxygen mask first.

Why I Built This

I started Village of Play because I saw the gap and I couldn't unsee it. These skills belong everywhere. Not just in doctors' offices when something goes wrong. Not just in academic journals that most people will never read. In your organization. In your community. In your daily life. In your children's lives before they ever need to learn it the hard way.

As long as you have a brain, executive functioning skills exist in you. The question is whether you are building them deliberately or depleting them quietly.

I know which one I choose now. I wish someone had handed me the language twenty years earlier.

Jamila Godfrey is the founder of Village of Play, a brain fitness and executive functioning organization. She brings over twenty-five years of corporate experience in Canada including senior roles in marketing and corporate training where she led workforce learning through one of the most disruptive periods in recent organizational history.

After her son's ADHD diagnosis led her into deep study of executive functioning neuroscience, Jamila recognized that these skills were missing from the broader conversation in workplaces, schools, and communities. She built Village of Play to close that gap through two streams: the Mindset Lab for children ages 5 to 17, and Capacity Under Pressure workshops for adult and corporate teams. She is certified in Adult Learning & Development, an approved program support provider 2 Alberta School boards, certified in mental health first aid and in psychological health & safety in the workplace.

Jamila is neurodivergent, a mother, a former Big Sister, and a lifelong advocate for the kind of learning that meets people exactly where they are. She believes the village is where brain fitness belongs.

Learn more at villageofplay.com or book a free discovery call to bring Capacity Under Pressure into your organization.