Episode 5 - It’s fine…I’m fine… why being FINE is worse than FAILING for your business and your brain
This week on Call Her Brilliant
I have a new favorite word - boreout - that perfectly describes how as hyper-competent gold star collectors we don’t burn out…but we absolutely hit plateaus
2025 was the most challenging year of my career. Because as a kid who grew up following the rules, it forced me to question something I absolutely thought was 100% true:
that you need to master step 1 and 2 before you move to step 3.
I’ll show you how to decide if it’s time to throw out the baby with the bathwater if you want to elevate your capacity this year.
Plus: I’m ignoring the anti-coffee propaganda and doubling down on caffeine in this week’s Brain fact or fluff
Transcript
This week on Call Her Brilliant, I have a new favorite word, bore out, that perfectly describes how as hyper competent gold star collectors, we don't burn out, but we absolutely hit plateaus.
2025 was the most challenging year of my career, because it forced me to question a deeply held belief that I grew up with since I was little about following the rules, that you need to master step one and two before you move on to step three.
But as brilliant women, that might not be true. Maybe you need to start at step seven or even go backwards to step 20. I'll show you how to decide if it's time to throw out the baby with the bathwater if you want to elevate your capacity this year.
Plus, I'm doubling down on coffee in this week's Brain Factor Fluff. Let's do this. Welcome to Call Her Brilliant, the podcast for ambitious women building businesses and lives that refuse to be average.
You got the gold stars and turn that grit into step by step success. But you're ready for more if only your capacity wasn't the bottleneck. You want focus, freedom, and a brain that can actually keep up with your ambition.
That's more than mindset, more than strategy. From athletes to entrepreneurs, we're trading burnout for peak performance science. So you can create a life that's brilliant by design.
I'm a rule follower by nature, because rules are what keep us from descending into hunger game style anarchy and chaos, right? I always knew that I didn't just follow the rules because someone told me to, though.
I follow the rules because it keeps us safe, keeps people happy, keeps things moving smoothly. It's why I grumble to myself every time I'm approaching a merge on the freeway, and some jerk is tailgating the car in front of them off the exit.
Like we all know how to zipper merge, right? Apparently not. Drives me bonkers.
At Halloween, when there's a sign on the candy that says, take one, I take one. I still rip up those cardboard rings they use now to attach bottles, like pop bottles, together.
They replace the plastic ones that we grew up with with cardboard, but my brain still thinks about the baby seals, so I cut them up.
2:20
Navigating Plateaus
And doing the right thing has been a huge part of how I see myself, not just as a human, but as a business owner. And because of that, 2025 was probably the most challenging year of my career. I had done all the right things for 40 years.
I worked hard in school. I was smart, but not effortlessly smart. Like I studied, I put in the time, right?
I got my degrees like I was supposed to. Got my dream job on a hospital neuroscience team. And when I got bored there, I started my private practice, and I did all the right things there too.
You've probably heard me tell the story of how I put my daughter in the bath because I was doing so much multitasking. But I pushed through. I made money.
I worked hard. I got a steady stream of referrals. Business was good.
And then last year, it wasn't because it was also the year I started to question, is this really what I want to do for the rest of my life?
Building my business was a fun challenge, and the momentum, that progress that I could see, was really rewarding. Every time I'd get a new client booking in my clinic, I'd smile at my phone, right? Because it meant I was doing things right.
The first couple of years, I loved my clinic. I had staff who were fun to work with, women who were working on their degrees while they worked and went to school, and it was a joy to mentor them and feel their excitement.
And I got invited to do a bunch of fun presentations for various clients. That got me more referrals. Things were going good.
But after I got things running, that rush and excitement of building something, things started to hit a plateau. And I know that some people would have been happy with that, right? Making money, things are consistent, reliable.
But if you're anything like me, and you probably are if you're listening to this podcast, it wasn't enough. I knew what burnout felt like.
I'd been on the edge of it before, putting my daughter in the bath half-dressed, locking myself in the stairwell twice in the same week, calling a farm a professional garden, because I totally blanked on the word.
I knew I wasn't burnt out this time, but I wasn't exactly feeling brilliant either. I'd hit a ledge, a plateau, where I had to decide, do I keep doing what I'm doing? Do I be content with the success that I've created?
Or do I burn it all down and build something different? And let's just be clear, I am not a burn it all down kind of gal. I am the responsible one.
So I gently stretched out my feelers to try new things. I had started my first podcast back in 2020. That was fun for a while.
It was new. It was exciting. It was a challenge until it started to feel like one more thing on my to do list.
Then I did a TEDx talk. Also fun, also super challenging. I had to sprint through a thunderstorm with no umbrella to get to the venue, but I made it.
But I still felt stagnant. Each of those little wins was good, but I still felt like I was stuck. And each time, I'd start to question what I was doing with my habits.
Because habits are how we fix things, right? As smart women, that's what we've been taught. Smart, responsible, hardworking, we fix our habits and we'll feel so much better.
You'll accomplish so much more. And I do absolutely believe habits are important. They're on the three pillars that determine whether you're able to access your brilliance.
Your cells, your habits, your wiring. All super important. The problem is that us high achievers, us ambitious women, us Monica Gellers, we get stuck in the habits because habits are the easiest thing to change.
But they're not always the solution. I shared back in episode three how I hired more help and was more overwhelmed than ever. Go back and listen if you haven't.
It's a good one. The quick summary is this.
When I was the most busy in my clinic, when I absolutely ran out of time, where I was staying up past midnight every night and getting up at six trying to cram it all in, I hadn't had a day off in months, I did the smart thing and hired help.
But because my wiring was still, I need to work hard. Hard work means doing more stuff. I need to keep my staff busy.
I don't want them to be bored. When I hired more, I also just doubled my own workload by taking on more projects. So, the net was me being more busy and behind.
This is the wall I came up against over and over over the past year. I was making decisions in my business based on what was smart, based on the wiring my brain had spent 40 years learning. Here's what was going on in my brain.
I want to grow my business. I want more consulting clients. So, I'll learn from the experts.
And the experts that I was following were people like Amy Porterfield and Marie Forleo, who built their businesses from scratch. And I thought, this is the path I need to take too. They leverage social media.
They built followings. They created these communities who love what they do and are excited to join every course or program they offer, right? And so my brain said, okay, step one is to master social media and build this community.
Step two is to create these small offers that sell like hotcakes. Then I can build bigger things I actually want to do, like write books and speak on stages. The problem was I sucked at step one and I sucked at step two.
And that was a huge deal, not just for my confidence, but for my business, because for years, I kept pushing, kept forcing myself to get better at step one and two. I hired business coaches. I took courses.
I practiced and post all these different types of reels and carousels, and I made all these mini offers and all these things I was supposed to be doing. I followed the right steps, and it didn't work. I didn't grow on social.
I wasn't landing the consulting clients I wanted. And in the background, my clinic, which had done so well for so long, was slowly suffering because I stopped putting focus there.
All this time was being spent trying to master these steps I thought I was supposed to take. The problem was not my work ethic. I did all the right things.
I followed every single step in those programs that totally worked for other people. They just weren't working for me because it didn't match my wiring or my brilliance.
And that took me a long time to accept it, because it felt like I should be able to figure this out. I'm supposed to be good at everything. If I just work hard enough, I can learn it all.
And that's true. I do believe we're capable of learning anything. But there will also be things that fit better naturally with my strengths, my zone of brilliance.
And I can bang my head up against the wall doing things I think I'm supposed to be able to master, or I can throw it all out and start fresh. And that, my friend, is really hard to do for us high achievers. In psychology, we call it dissonance.
When the way that you're acting, behaving doesn't align with your beliefs, your values, and your wiring. Like, if I tried to take two pieces of candy from the Halloween bucket when the sign says take one, I would absolutely feel that in my body.
I'd know it was off. And I had that feeling about my business, that it wasn't aligned. But I didn't know how to fix it because I was languishing.
Meh? But not burned out. If my business was totally failing, and I was making zero money, and I was so tired I couldn't get out of bed, I'd know that I needed to change, right?
But the hardest part was I wasn't at rock bottom. We recognize those rock bottom moments, right? It was more of an eh moment.
I mentioned last week that I'm reading an Adam Grant book right now. Full disclosure, it's not my favorite of his. It's not as unput downable as some of his other books have been for me.
If you really want a great one, one of my favorites is Still Think Again. But I'm reading Hidden Potential, which was exactly what I needed to be reading right now, because I learned a new word. Bore out, not burnout, bore out.
And it described not only what I've been feeling, but what so many of my clients have been telling me.
Like when they'd say they're mostly handling it, but kept feeling not bad exactly, but not great, or not motivated, or excited, or brilliant, right? Burnout is the emotional exhaustion that accumulates when you're overloaded.
Like when I was working 60-hour weeks building my business and was so prickly that I had to intentionally stop myself and take a deep breath every time my daughter was procrastinating, getting her boots on when we're trying to get out the door,
because I was so prickly, any little thing was going to set me off. And then I put my kid in the bath half dressed, right? That's burnout.
Bore out, according to Adam Grant, is the emotional deadening you feel when you're under stimulated, when you're bored. And not just bored because I have nothing to do. We all know being a little bit bored is really good for our brains.
Actually, it's great for your imagination, your creativity, but more pervasively bored. Like where every day looks the same. Not bad exactly, but not exciting.
Where I've built this business and it's running, it's running smooth, but it's not a challenge anymore.
And a few chapters later, he gave me an even better word to describe that feeling of stuckness, languishing, that emotional experience of stalling.
Again, we're not depressed or burnt out, because I wasn't, but I was definitely feeling like I was underperforming compared to my potential. Like every day starts with the case of the Mondays.
And he explains this becomes a catch-22, because the research shows that when we're languishing, it messes with our focus, it dulls our motivation. Absolutely, I can agree there. And let me tell you, my screen time reports on my phone are so high.
When I'm in that languishing mode, I can't stay focused and I can't get the oomph to get working. So I'm absolutely checking my phone every couple of minutes and dopamine scrolling on Instagram. I can't stop watching those videos right now.
Side quest. I know it's like an older trend, but I'm just getting into it.
Where's the start of that for non-blondes song, then it cuts to Nicki Minaj rapping, and it's always like a celebrity doing the first part, and then like their dad or some like super funny person you wouldn't expect to be doing the Nicki Minaj role.
So funny. Anyway, I know I'm behind on that trend, but I can watch like 10 of those in a row right now. Languishing messes with our focus and motivation.
But the worst part is you know you need to do something, but you doubt it will actually make a change. So nothing happens.
Not only was I stuck in Borout, I was languishing, I wasn't moving forward, and my wiring was telling me I just needed to keep practicing, which was getting me more bored, trying to master steps one and two. I needed to get unbored.
To align my brain was what I'm actually good at, and start at step seven. And maybe you do too.
Because the people I was trying to emulate, the Marie Forlos and the Amy Porterfields and the Jenna Kutgers, they have different strengths in me and a different path. Because I wasn't actually starting from scratch.
Yes, I was building a community on social media, but I have multiple degrees, including a PhD. I am already really good at what I do. No, I'm not great on social media, but I give darn good trainings.
I am great when I present. That's how I started my clinic, saying, can I come present for your group and share what I do? Got me clients, right?
I was forcing myself to start at someone else's step one. I was bored and frustrated because I was trying to be good at something I wasn't really wired to do, and I wasn't making any real progress.
I was doing something that didn't align with my strengths. And that's a little bit of where I still am now, because this is hard wiring to shift.
Knowing that something's off, putting out those gentle feelers to try new things, and they don't work, right? So then I feel less motivated. I doubt myself more, and I hold back on taking bigger risks, because what if it doesn't work?
And that's the real wiring block for ambitious, high-achieving, responsible women like us. What if I go all in?
What if I decide this is the year I get booked on 20 stages, and this is the year I publish two books, and this is the year I start that brand-new business that's been on the back of my mind for months now?
What if I go all in, try something new, and it doesn't work? Or worse, what if things get worse?
15:58
Progress Requires Regression
Here's the hard truth. The research says, yes, things are going to get worse before you get better. Here's the science.
After pouring over more than 100 years of evidence, cognitive scientist Wayne Gray and John, I'm going to say this wrong, John Linsfield, found something interesting. When our performance stagnates, before it improves again, it declines.
We actually get worse before we get better. And not just the like two steps forward, one step back mantra we've been fed since we were little, it could be 30 steps back before you go forward again. Because you need to find a completely new path.
For example, in one study of over 28,000 NBA players, teams got worse, as expected, when their star player was injured. But here's the fun part. When that star player came back, they won even more games than before he was hurt.
Why? Not because the star was back, but because while he was gone, the other players had to find a new path, new strengths. They had to start passing to different people, learning new patterns, learning new routines and skills.
So they actually had more skills once the star came back. But first, they had to get worse, right? And that is hard to accept.
Happened to me last year. My most reliable referral source, that probably sent me like 40% of my work over the previous seven years, all of a sudden wasn't sending me referrals.
They had some staff changes, the contacts I knew before weren't there for me to reach out to, and it got worse for a bit. I wasn't filling spots. I wasn't making the money I was used to.
I did find new referral sources that might end up being even better fit for me going forward.
But the problem is, in the moment, that's a really hard pill to swallow for us hard workers, that things will get worse before they get better if we want to move past a plateau, because no one wants to get worse, right?
Especially not those of us who are used to working hard and consistently improving. We want to keep grinding.
But when you've maxed out your potential with business as usual, when you know in your gut maybe you're not burnt out, but you could be bored out, something's got to shift. And that shift isn't just habits, it's wiring.
Because when we encourage people to do your best, they actually perform worse. Here's a science. We've all heard that message, right?
Especially those of us raised in the 90s, where your best wasn't taught, it was get it done, right? Your best was probably not acceptable when we were growing up.
So we became grownups, and we swung way too far in the other direction, with participation trophies and encouraging our kids to do their best.
I know I've said it at least a hundred times to Allison before she competes or performs, do your best, have fun. That's the right messaging if we want them to succeed. Right?
No, apparently, it's not. Across hundreds of experiments, people who were encouraged to do their best perform worse and learn less compared to those who were randomly assigned goals that are specific and difficult.
In short, when we tell people to do their best, they don't do it, because there's no external reference. What does do my best mean? Right?
Think back to telling my daughter to do her best when she's competing for cheerleading. Does that mean pointing her toes? Does that mean no falls?
Does that mean hitting all her jumps? Placing? Well, it can mean a lot of things to do her best.
Maybe for me, do my best means I'm okay with making six figures this year. Maybe it means I'm okay with publishing articles and not a book. Maybe I'm okay showing up on Instagram and TikTok every day, even if I have no growth.
We settle when we try our best, because it's easy for our brains to opt out. And we're not here to settle, not in this community. So how do we rewire these patterns?
How do we get our high achieving brains to accept that we might take 20 steps back before we move forward again? How do we set goals that are challenging enough, but don't make us feel like failures?
We train our brains, and most importantly, our bodies, to hold that discomfort.
The discomfort of going backward before we go forward, of getting worse before we get better, and of making lots and lots and lots of mistakes without the certainty of knowing it will pay off. That's an elite skill.
One really exemplified by today's smart women doing smart things.
20:56
Simone Bilesʼ Resilience
Smart women doing smart things. Today's smart women doing smart things. American gymnast Simone Biles.
My favorite American gymnastics story used to be Keri Strug at the 96 Olympics. If you're an elder millennial like me, you remember watching from home on my giant box TV, those ones that for real, if they fell over, they would crush you, right?
Keri Strug was the last American gymnast to compete on vault that year.
If you're not a gymnastics fan like me, vault is the one where they run down the runway, hit the springboard, launch into the air over the vault, flip and twist and land amazingly on the other side.
More gracefully than I can even step over my cat on the couch. So Keri Strug is last to go, and she has to nail her performance to win gold for the US team.
Which would have been a huge upset at the time, because back in the 90s, gymnastics was dominated by teams from Russia and Romania. It wasn't the US dominance like it is now.
So Keri Strug gets ready, she salutes the judges, her first attempt, she runs, she launches, she falls, and we all know something's wrong. Even on grainy 1996 TV, we can see that she's in pain.
She stands up, she kind of limps to the side, her coach goes over, gives her a pep talk, she's walking back to the start with him, but she's limping and grimacing and nodding. But she has to nail her next attempt to win.
So she salutes, she runs, she launches, lands basically on one foot on the other side, salutes the judges, and collapses. She had to be carried to the awards ceremony by her coach, where her leg all bandaged up, she tore something in her leg.
But it was remarkable to watch at the time. She did it. She won gold for the US team.
Yes, it was amazing. Yes, it's still an incredible story of what our bodies are capable of. But 30 years later, we think of resilience differently, right?
Not so much about how much can we push through, but knowing when to step back, to move forward, like Simone Biles did after Tokyo. The 2020 Tokyo Olympics were weird, right in the middle of the pandemic. No fans, no family, tens of precautions.
They actually canceled them in 2020, and so the 2020 Olympics was held in 2021. So already, these women are starting with more pressure on their shoulders.
We're watching women's gymnastics, and the US team, as expected, dominated day one of the event. They qualified for team finals. Simone Biles, who was a star, she qualified for all-around finals, and every single event final as well.
She was dominant. We get to the day of team finals. Simone starts warming up on vault, and something goes a bit kooky-dooks.
The announcers are saying how she seems off. And of course, they zoom in right on her face, and she looks confused and scared. And then we all watch as she puts her tracksuit on and leaves the gym.
And everyone at home was wondering, did she get hurt? What happened? She did come back out with her tracksuit on and a mask on.
She didn't compete. She pulled herself out of the competition. She cheered her team on from the side.
They still won, but she ended up pulling out of the vault finals, bars and floor finals, the individual all-around final, where she was favored to win gold as well. She did compete on Beam with reduced difficulty in her routine. Still got a bronze.
She's an amazing person. And the whole world was talking about it and judging. Right?
Oh my gosh, the negative comments that she got about how she let down her team and what's wrong with her, and she should just be tough enough, and what's going on. And we learned afterward that she got the yips.
In basketball, we say a player gets the yips when the star player all of a sudden can't make a free throw, right? Something they practiced thousands of times in their career, can't shoot one if their life depended on it.
In gymnastics, they call it the twisties. What happened to Simone Biles was when she was warming up, she lost herself in the air. She lost her sense of where her body was.
She got disoriented. Her muscle memory cut out. She had a mental block, the yips.
And despite all the judgment and pressure I'm sure she was feeling, she chose to stop. She stepped back. She has a Netflix documentary that came out kind of like right before the Paris Olympics and kind of during the Olympics as well.
And it's really good. You should totally go watch it. She shares that how after Tokyo, it was really, really hard for her to get back into the gym because she still had this mental block.
There was a disconnect between her brain and her body. And she had to go all the way back to doing super basic skills to rewire that muscle memory.
She also went to therapy with a peak performance sports psychologist to rewire that connection between her brain and body. And it did not happen over night. Her first return to major competition wasn't until 2023, two years later.
But by the 2024 Olympics in Paris, she was on. And it was so fun to watch her fully in her brilliance. She looked so strong and powerful and confident, like she was really having fun, right?
Totally different than back in Tokyo. She'd taken the 20 steps back. It was awful.
And she found a path that actually put her ahead of where she was four years before. US won the team final. Simone got gold in the individual all around.
She won gold on vault, silver on floor. And she was silly and goofy and joking with her teammates and other teams' competitors. And she really looked like she was in her zone of brilliance.
Here's some interesting research for you. Perfectionists might be at a greater risk for mental blocks, just like Simone had.
Because we tend to be more prone to performance pressure and anxiety, which can actually turn off that autopilot and muscle memory in athletes. And that matters for you and me too.
You've probably thought about how athletes use muscle memory and autopilot, right? But all of our brains rely on this function.
Think about when you're driving to work or you're driving your kids to school, and you all of a sudden get there and you're like, oh, did I stop at all the stoplights? Right? Because you're on a mental autopilot driving there.
That's a good thing. It saves energy. It makes our lives easier.
But when you're stressed and all of a sudden you can't remember the word farm, and you're like, you know, that thing with vegetables, but like for money, a professional garden? Yeah, that was me. That's autopilot disrupted in real life.
So it's not just athletes that need to worry about the yips. We do too. Simone Biles figured it out.
She took 20 steps back after Tokyo. It was worth it. And I can only imagine how hard that was.
To ignore the trolls, I'm sure she got every single day, not just online, but legitimate news outlets. To go back to basics, when she was used to having skills named after her, she was so accomplished.
And to try something completely different from the work hard, get it done, push forward wiring, that I'm sure helped her for most of her career. Simone Biles knew she needed to take a different path. To realign herself, her patterns, and her wiring.
And she had the tenacity to do it. That's why she's this week's Smart Women Doing Smart Things. Smart Women Doing Smart Things.
29:31
Coffee Benefits
Okay, before we end today, let's do a quick round of brain fact or fluff. Brain fact or brain fluff. Where we separate neuroscience from nonsense, whether that viral brain hack is backed by science or just Instagram glitter.
Today, we're talking about coffee. In my house, we set our coffee machine on a timer every night because if I can wake up and smell the coffee percolating, it definitely helps me drag myself out of bed. I am not a morning person.
But does it actually have any benefits for your body and more importantly, your brain? Let's start here.
Metaanalytic studies, which are studies where they aggregate the results across sometimes hundreds of studies with thousands of people, these studies consistently find that if you drink three cups of coffee per day, it adds 6% to your life
expectancy. So let's say you're a woman living in Canada like me, our life expectancy right now is around 84 years. That means drinking three cups of coffee a day could add up to five years to your life because it reduces all cause mortality.
And there's some specific benefits for certain health conditions.
In one study of over 400,000 people, those who drank light to moderate coffee consumption had a 17% reduced risk of dying by cardiovascular disease and 21% less chance of dying by stroke.
People who drink up to three cups of coffee a day tend to have healthier hearts. But here's a caveat, if you drink too much coffee, a lot more than those three-ish cups a day, it can actually increase your risk of cardiovascular problems.
And coffee can interfere with how your body absorbs some medications. So check with your pharmacist. How do these coffee benefits work?
There are more than a thousand chemical compounds in coffee. A number of them have anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. Caffeine is one of them.
It's a big one for health benefits, but it's not the only one. So coffee could help your heart health, which we know is good for brain health, but does it actually have a direct effect on our brain? Yes.
Coffee and its bioactive compounds show neuroprotective impacts and have the potential to prevent things like neurodegenerative diseases.
That means coffee and the components like caffeine in coffee, but not just caffeine, doesn't work if you're just drinking Red Bull's FYI side quest here, it needs to be actual coffee, it's not just the caffeine that has the benefit.
When we drink coffee, it protects our brain cells, it has neuroprotective effects. The caffeine, for example, we know will lower the risk of neurodegeneration of our brain cells declining as we age.
In the short term, it also improves mood, alertness, learning and reaction time. So you feel better, you're faster and you're more focused.
In the long term, there's some evidence that regular coffee consumption can reduce risks of things like Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.
Moderate coffee consumption, again, around that three cups a day, is associated with up to 65 percent lower risk for developing Alzheimer's. So yes, coffee is good for you. Aim for around three cups per day.
That seems to be the sweet spot, which is good news for me because I have definitely seen some influencers saying lately that they're cutting out coffee, and I'm like, oh my gosh, you're leaving me with nothing. I need my little coffee treats.
So if you see that anti-coffee propaganda, feel free to ignore it. The research is clear. Coffee is good for your body and your brain.
This has been Brain Fact or Fluff. Brain Fact or Brain Fluff. That's all for today.
Thank you so much for tuning in. I'm Dr. Nicole Byers, and this is Call Her Brilliant.