What If Pushing Through Is the Problem? Burnout, Autoimmunity & Healing with Kristen Renee Appleby

Lisa Lacy (0:04)

Welcome to Notes from the Edge, where we have the conversations we should have been having all along.

We talk about the things that we're not talking about. I'm your host, Lisa Lacy, writer, trauma educator, executive advisor, and author of the upcoming memoir, Notes from a Certified Mad Woman.

Hey, hey, my friends. Welcome back to another episode of Notes from the Edge. I am your host, Lisa Lacy, and this is the place we have the conversations we should have been having all along. Guess what? You ain't talking about it. So today we're going to, and today's special guest is Kristen Renee Appleby. And today we're talking about trauma, identity, mental health, recovery, reinvention, and the things we perform in order to survive.

Stop performing your life, guys. We're talking about what happens to the person who has always been able to handle it. And Kristen and I were having a podcast before the podcast about being Gen Xers, and I think that's some of that too. Kristen Renee Appleby is an author, speaker, transformational coach, and founder of the Rebuild Collective. She spent years as a strategic partner in high-profile CEOs leading HR and operations, and even worked as a celebrity stylist for a leading New York fashion designer. From the outside, she had reached success. Inside, she was running on empty, constantly pushing and enduring, achieving, taking care of everyone else, and becoming increasingly disconnected from herself. Then, an autoimmune diagnosis hit her in her 30s, and she went on that decade-long search for answers, specialists, treatments, different modalities, examining what happened physically. But the patterns she carried through were emotions, work, relationships, finances, and the way to move through the world. And that was the foundation for her 12 Principle Healthy Foundation framework, designed to help you examine your entire life, not just pieces of it. She's also the author of three books, The Purpose Workbook, The Elements of Healing, and Healing the Money Wound. That's a big one. Kristen, welcome to Notes from the Edge. How are you doing today, my friend?

Kristen Renee Appleby (2:31)

Thank you. I'm great. And that was quite an intro. Thank you so much.

Lisa Lacy (2:35)

Always better when somebody else says it about you. I'm like, I've done a lot.

Kristen Renee Appleby (2:39)

That's great.

Lisa Lacy (2:40)

Yeah. Yeah, you have, girl.

Kristen Renee Appleby (2:42)

Yeah, you have.

Lisa Lacy (2:43)

So it's Notes from the Edge. So we are just going to dive right in. So you spent years being the woman who did it all, supporting executives, achieving professionally, pushing through, enduring, taking care of everybody else. So talk to us about when does strength start becoming a survival performance? When did you start recognizing that disconnection that we talked about in your bio?

Kristen Renee Appleby (3:09)

I honestly didn't know I was living over extending giving as a pleaser in the hustle. I didn't know any of that. To me, that was just life and normal. So not to jump right ahead, but it was until I received a diagnosis that you kind of end up looking at all parts of your life. That's what I did after trying everything. So I didn't know I was living that way at all until I really had to take a good long look and slow down and start looking within and to see that you were living that way and to accept that you're a pleaser. And it's my personality to kind of bend and mold to help people or even when you're in a support position, that's your job is to kind of read the other person and learn how to work how they want to work. And I think I just did that in all parts of my life when I look back at it, like as a girlfriend, as a daughter, as an employee, a boss, like I was just trying to understand.

I see some good and like you want to understand the culture, but you also want to be your whole authentic self-loving, worthy self too with boundaries and knowing when to say no. So yeah, it took having to take a look at my life to really understand that I had been living that way.

Lisa Lacy (4:50)

Yeah. I think hindsight helps us a lot because when we're, and I think sometimes when we're in it, we don't have language for it. And that's why I think people like you are so beneficial and so pivotal because you're here to help give us language for what we're going through. And you said a word that I think is so important, and that's the word no.

So talk to us about when the diagnosis hit you, when that came. How did that come about and how did that teach you to say no?