Redefining Ambition After Burnout | Zapier’s Kelly Vaughn
AI and 10x culture promise peak performance, but are they pushing engineers past their limits?
What happens when the person trained to spot burnout becomes its next victim?
Kelly Vaughn is a Senior Engineering Manager at Zapier, the author of the
Substack, and a trained therapist. She joins hosts Ben and Andrew to share her incredibly candid journey of discovering burnout in herself. Kelly reveals how she (despite her professional understanding of burnout's mechanisms) found herself deep in its grip, recounting the slow realizations like dwindling passion, increasing cynicism, and distinct physical tolls like disrupted sleep and a loss of hunger cues.This raw conversation offers vital lessons for anyone in a high-pressure career (and let’s face it: that’s all of us!). As the tech landscape accelerates with AI, Kelly shares insights on managing its pressures and opportunities. She redefines ambitions for herself alongside the non-negotiables she established for her own well-being when seeking her new role. Listeners will gain powerful insights into identifying their own limits, the courage for pivotal changes, and integrating new demands without self-sacrifice.
"As somebody who, as a trained therapist, I'm very familiar with the signs of burnout, and yet I fell victim to it myself. And it also goes to show that even therapists need therapists because we all need that third party to remind us what's going on."
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