The number one reason clients reach out to me is burnout — they're feeling exhausted, they're contemplating a career change, or they're wondering whether starting their own business might be the answer.

Upon deeper exploration, many discover they're stuck in a Groundhog Day scenario: experiencing the same challenges on repeat, unable to pinpoint the source of their exhaustion. Before making any major career decision, it helps to get clear on where your energy is actually going.

Taking Stock of Your Energy

One of the most useful exercises I give clients is deceptively simple: spend one week tracking what energizes you versus what depletes you. Not what you think should energize you — what actually does, in practice, day to day.

Three categories tend to reveal the most about the source of burnout:

1. Your Roles, Responsibilities, and Tasks

Some tasks genuinely invigorate you. Others drain you faster than anything else. When you track your energy honestly over a week, patterns emerge — and those patterns can tell you a lot about whether you need to shift your current role, pivot your career direction, or make a more significant change.

If the activities that deplete you make up most of your day, that's worth taking seriously. And if you find that none of your current tasks energize you, that's an important data point about fit — not just stress level.

2. Your Interactions with People

A difficult boss, toxic leadership, or chronically negative colleagues can exhaust even the most resilient person. Sometimes there are real opportunities to improve the dynamic from within. Other times, the most honest answer is that the environment itself is the problem — and no amount of personal development will change that.

Separating "I'm burned out from this role" from "I'm burned out from this workplace" is a crucial distinction that shapes what change actually needs to happen.

3. Your Self-Care Outside of Work

Even people who genuinely love their careers burn out when they neglect life outside of work. This is especially true in roles with a strong emotional component — caregiving, teaching, client-facing work, healing professions. The emotional output is real, and it has to be replenished somewhere.

Devoting attention to self-care, setting clearer boundaries, and developing your own coping tools can make a significant difference — sometimes without any change to the job itself.

What the Exercise Reveals

Most clients who do this tracking exercise come back with at least one surprise — something they thought was draining them that actually isn't, or something they'd written off that turns out to be genuinely energizing. That clarity is what makes the next decision (stay, pivot, or leave) much easier to make with confidence.

You don't have to have the answer yet. Start with the data.