Rebuilding after Burnout with Liz Bradford

Leadership shouldn't be about who speaks the loudest, but rather who speaks the truest. I'm Charlotte Otto. Welcome to Speech Bubbles, the podcast that's rewriting the rulebook on leadership, communication and success. In every episode, we're bursting the bubbles of traditional leadership, bringing you raw, real conversations with trailblazers who don't just challenge the status quo, they obliterate it. We're talking to heads of communication who know the power of words, HR mavericks reshaping workplace culture, and leaders from backgrounds that have been silenced for far too long. This is where vulnerability meets strategy, where authenticity beats artifice, where diverse voices don't just speak, they roar. Whether you're climbing the corporate ladder or building your own speech bubbles is your roadmap to leadership that's human, powerful, and unapologetically you. Are you ready to transform how you communicate, lead, and succeed? Then let's burst some bubbles. My guest today is Liz Bradford. Liz Bradford is the founder of Transform Perform and a leading authority on sustainable executive performance and longevity science. She is also a former MD and Chief Operating officer with a storied career at hsbc, bank of America, Merrill lynch and Swift. Having run global teams of over 700 people with both P and L responsibility and C suite experience, Liz has reinvented herself and her business. Today, through Transform Perform, Liz works with ambitious professionals to integrate longevity science with practical leadership development. Her approach focuses on building authentic, purpose driven leadership styles that energize rather than drain. Liz is sceptical of work, life, balance, rhetoric and says that burnout comes from hard work or overwork without purpose. She says your business can survive a bad quarter, your career can recover from a misstep, but you only get one version of yourself. And unlike your business, you can't pivot to a new model when things break down. Switching roles won't fix burnout if you bring the same broken patterns with you. Liz Bradford, welcome to Speech Bubbles.

Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be here, Charlotte. Thank you for having me.

Well, it's lovely to have you with us, Liz. Let's talk about burnout and broken patterns. Why do leaders get stuck in cycles of overwork and how do they get rid of them?

Oh, that's a big question to start with, I think, because we get very addicted to the dopamine hit of being good at what we do often and sometimes we don't notice that however hard we're working at what we do, if we're doing it the wrong direction or if we're doing it in A way that doesn't fulfill our sense of purpose. We can find that we end up depleting our resources so much that we end up, without realising it, reaching that burnout point. So many of my clients are incredibly successful, high achieving people and they've found that very rewarding. So great status, great titles, lots of pay. But they've realized, and I don't know if it's generational, I remember growing up and people joking about things like midlife crises. I don't think it's a midlife crisis so much as people just realizing that actually what they thought that they were chasing isn't as rewarding as they had anticipated. And very often, if we're working on things that don't energize us and aren't aligned with our purpose, actually the money and the titles and the status can only go so far. And then we find that actually we're very disenchanted with our own existence.

Now, that disenchantment that you talk about is also personal to you. And you do describe how you personally, despite prioritizing your own health, also hit a wall one day. What happened?

So I've actually burnt out more than once. I call it like 1.5 times. So the first time was fairly spectacular. It was before burnout was, in anyone's vernacular, wellbeing was never talked about in the office. I've obviously been working for quite a while, but about 10 years into my career, I was working in London, I was working in an investment bank and I just. My husband came home one day and found me in tears at the kitchen table. And he was obviously very concerned.

He's like, what's wrong?

Everything else. And I'd found out that I was being fast tracked for a promotion and I just couldn't bear the idea of doing what I was doing for another two years. And nothing against the people I was working with, nothing against the organisation, but I realised then that it wasn't going to be enough. And I just actually couldn't bring myself to sort of keep going in, keep having that fight every day. So at the time, packed up my life, packed up my husband, moved to the other side of the world and thought, well, everything will be fine. It's a context change, it's an environment change. That must have been what the problem was. And about 18 months later, I found myself not that far off the verge again of feeling the same way. So lots of symptoms of burnout, which we now recognize, things like feeling really withdrawn, not getting any joy from the things that we're used to pulling back from relationships, digestive issues, sleep issues, things that we now know are all symptomatic of that. But at the time I really didn't know what was going on. And then I was introduced to my very first coach. I was lucky enough to be on a leadership development course at the time with my employer and they gave us resilience training and introduced us to these coaches. And that's how I first got really into the wellbeing side from a burnout perspective, as opposed to before that I'd just been competing and athletic and everything else. But then I was starting to use it to harness physical well being, but also emotional wellbeing and connected wellbeing in order to protect myself from burnout.

I'm so sorry that happened to you. And I think that we all in our corporate careers go through a journey where we unfortunately have to learn some lessons. But I'm really interested to hear about that combination of leadership development and physical training, resilience and wellbeing, because I think what you offer your clients is quite unusual in that you offer both with Transform Perform. Would you talk about that? A. Yeah.

I really don't think we can detach the sort of how we are and our own well being and then our careers and our success. I think you can do it up to a point, but once you start to get to certain levels of seniority, if it's not sustainable and as you said, I don't actually believe in work life balance, I would be a massive hypocrite and many people I've worked with in the past would call me out if I said I did. But I think it's therefore important that we understand what wellbeing is for us individually, how we need to take care of ourselves because we're all unique and different and then how we bring that into our work. And it's particularly important for leaders because we can choose to either cast a shadow or cast a light and it goes far, far further than we realize. And if we're going into our day jobs and we're taking care of ourselves and we're prioritizing the things that matter and that will vary for everyone. Other people in our teams will see us doing that and other leaders and our peers will see us doing that, and it means that it's almost infectious in a good way or it can be the other way of course as well. So if we're taking good care of ourselves, that sends a very clear message. It doesn't matter how many headspace apps or well, being programs or, you know, Friday afternoons off, we talk about if our people don't see us doing it, they will not follow. And anyone who's had children will know this, right? It's not do as I say, not as I do.

So, yeah.

So I always put the two hand in hand. And particularly because I help people who are either feeling stuck or who just want to go to the next level, or people at the moment, quite commonly in retrenchment as well, which is an amazing opportunity to recalibrate what really matters and actually reposition and take care of ourselves and come back from a stronger foundation. But obviously in the moment, it doesn't necessarily feel like that. So I always coach both elements of it because I just don't think we can disassociate our work selves from our personal selves.

I love that. Cast a light, not a shadow. I think that's such a lovely metaphor. Simple encapsulation of how leaders affect the people around them, or without ever even saying a single word, just by how they show up. Now, you talked about recalibration, and I'm starting to talk about leadership reinvention. And you, like me, had a long corporate career and you've now reinvented yourself. Was there any grief in letting go of that corporate identity?

There actually was. And I was surprised because I had my coaching business on the side for a good three years before I left corporate. And I had given my previous employer, I'd given them over six months notice. It wasn't like it was a sudden or abrupt transition. But then when I left, I did find, yeah, something just felt amiss. It was so much a part of my identity. Even though obviously this was something I was very passionate to go and focus on full time. I think there is a grief process, but I think all change, and obviously we both work with transformation. All change comes with a grief process. It's just whether we acknowledge it, embrace it, and how quickly we move through the stages, I think.

And what do you think are the key qualities of someone who's able to successfully recalibrate or reinvent in the way that you talk about? Some of your clients are now in retrenchment and having to go through that process. What are the qualities they need to be able to successfully complete it?

I think it really comes down to understanding ourselves. I'm often amazed how many people have gotten so far in life without really getting to know themselves. Like what their core values are, what their strengths are, what energizes them. And once we're coming from that foundation. And once we're proving to ourselves that we're taking care of ourselves, and this is where some of the physical wellbeing stuff really comes into play. So how are we eating, how are we moving? Are we getting enough sleep? It doesn't have to be going and, you know, starting to run marathons or anything. But once we start proving to ourselves that we're taking care of ourselves, we build a degree of trust, which very often, if you're on the corporate wheel, that gets broken all the time, you're continually making sacrifices and letting yourself down on things that you told yourself you'd do. And so being able to rebuild that and really understand who you are means we can come back a lot stronger, a lot more focused, and a lot more purpose driven.

Yeah, I love that. I worked with a coach when I left corporate and that really helped me to identify my values, which are freedom, justice and authenticity. And those inform me, you know, three, four years later, then they continue to inform the work that I do. So freedom's important to me because I can work wherever and however I like. And authenticity is really important to me because I always felt a little bit like I had a. I don't know if I had a fake Persona, but I sort of felt like leadership felt a bit awkward and uncomfortable to me and then justice, which is why I talk about diversity and inclusion so much now. You're British and you've spent a lot of your career working in Hong Kong. You now spend some time in Dubai. What's it like shuttling between different cultures and countries?

I absolutely love it. And I don't know if we could count it as a completely different culture. But I also spent a lot of time in Australia. But I really like absorbing different perspectives. I have to admit, when I first moved from Australia to Hong Kong, that was quite a difficult transition for me, actually, because I'm a very direct person at the best of times. And then once you go to Australia and spend eight years there, you become extremely direct. So just adapting and actually, I'm sure you've come across the Erin Meyer work on cross cultural competency and stuff, but I found that very, very helpful to sort of learn to adjust. But I really enjoy it. I really enjoy the very different perspectives. I think I moved back to the UK at the beginning of this year and I was surprised how much I've loved being back because I'd been away for such a long time. So there is something about just a culture that you know in your bones and that really Resonates. So it's a nice comfort zone. But I like to push myself out of my comfort zone generally. And I find that working in completely different environments is a really good way to do that.

And where are your Cochise mostly located?

Oh, everywhere. Everywhere. All the way from the States down to Australia and everywhere in between.

That's fabulous. You know, I've written we need new leaders and I have this deep and abiding interest in leadership and in reputation and diversity. Talk to us a bit about your leadership path. What took you to that MD role?

Oh, good question. Well, as you know, I'm extremely passionate about diversity myself. And actually had it not been for that passion and the network it gave me, and a big part of that was when I was working at hsbc, I was also one of the global co chairs of one of their employee resource groups. And that gave me, because I was passionate about it, I was able to get over my own introversion and talk and facilitate and coordinate and influence, which had always been the key thing that held me back before. So everyone would always say you need to network and you need to, you know, put yourself out there. But as a hardcore introvert, that can be very hard to do until you find something that you're very passionate about. And then once I started to do that and commit a fairly decent amount of time to that, people started to notice and people started to see those transferable skills. So if you can project manage something for an employee resource group, you can project manage something within your day job with technical skills. If you can influence a bunch of senior leaders to come along and represent and raise awareness, then you can do a similar thing in a boardroom. So people noticed that more. But also I had a very safe space to build the confidence in those skills and I was able to build a network without it feeling transactional or overly awkward for me because I knew I was either working with people who were already passionate or I was convincing people that I felt would be amazingly passionate if we harnessed them. So I think it played a big part in that. And then undeniably, once you're female, and particularly if you're female and not from the place where you are operating, it comes with a fair degree of responsibility to then follow through on that, to jump at opportunities if they're put in front of you and not to back off because you know that there are lots of other people watching.

Yeah, I love that that your personal passion gave you the courage to speak up and speak out, that then put you in the line for bigger promotions. And it goes to what you say about becoming visible, doesn't it? And that visibility is so important for people who are hungry for more. It's so important not just to do a great job, but also to be seen doing a great job.

Yeah, that strategic visibility is something that people really struggle with because they feel like it's some form of self promotion or self branding. But unfortunately, being really good at our jobs is table stakes. Being seen to be good at our jobs and have that skill recognized is what we need to move forward. And I think many of the people that I work with, they come from cultures where they have not grown up in a way that they've been actively encouraged to be seen. And so you're dealing with a lot of neural pathway patterning to stay quiet and subdued. And you don't have to be super loud, but you do have to get comfortable with being visible.

Yeah, that's one thing that comes up. And we need new leaders a lot. That doing a great job is actually only 50% of the job, not only for yourself, but it's also really important to represent for others. So those people whose cultural patterning is stay quiet, stay small. If they can see one other person who's similar to them, who's doing strategic visibility successfully, it actually builds a bridge for them to walk across and it opens doors for them, which I love when I think about justice. Talk to us about your leadership style.

So, as I said, I am very direct, I would like to say, and I know that my old team used to say I'm very firm but very fair and I'm actually a lot kinder than most people expect me to be. So I come across as fairly forceful and direct. And a lot of that is obviously time as well. So if you want to have a big impact, you tend to be over committed. Unfortunately, that's just the world in which we live. And so because of time pressure, I can come across as very concise, very direct, but actually there is a lot of kindness and warmth behind that. And I genuinely, genuinely believe that cognitive diversity makes us better as teams, as groups and even leaders. So I also now carve out quite a lot of my time really to challenge myself. And very often now I was actually only talking to someone about this at the weekend. I use AI to do it because I work a lot more on my own than I used to. I used to head a very big team and you would have people around all the time to pull you up or contradict. Whereas now I tend to run a lot of my thinking through and say, well, where am I wrong? Where could I have done better? And I think that continuing to try and evolve that way of thinking is very important, important for leadership, because otherwise we can get way too siloed in the way in which we've succeeded before, and it doesn't get us to where we need to get to.

Yeah, that's a brilliant tip, actually, particularly for people who work on their own to use AI as a kind of a thinking partner or somebody who can challenge you the way somebody in your team would have in the past. I really like that.

I think also if you're coming up in an organization, sometimes you get opportunities, for example, presenting to leadership, going in, having already had this run through, like, obviously not sharing anything confidential when you're doing it, but having your arguments already challenged and having the responses to those and really rounding out your thinking before you go in means you can present a much more comprehensive picture to senior leadership than you might have done before as well. So it's something I encourage my clients to do quite a bit when they're looking at that next step in their trajectory, particularly with, as you said before, if they come from a background where they've been told to stay quiet and stay small in the past.

Yeah, that's a lovely tip. Thank you so much for that, Liz. And how do you think about your own reputation?

Wow. As a leader or just generally, or

both, I suppose, where you are today.

Where I am today, I'm lucky enough that a lot of people come to me for advice, so I assume it's still not terrible as a reputation. I do think it's firm and fair. I think it's quite bold in terms of reputation. People didn't. And if you'd met me 20 years ago, you would not expect me to be where I am now. So I think people find that quite insane, inspiring. And I very often have people coming to me who are looking about making that transition and that change from corporate. So I think it's very transparent, very direct, and I hope it's in some way helpful to people.

I mean, I see that you're very active on LinkedIn. Is that just one element of your reputation that you think about actively?

I do do quite a few podcasts as well. So anything really that I think gets the word out to people that being yourself is more important than conforming and falling in line, and I find LinkedIn to be a very good platform for that, because I think a lot of people are back, to use the word that we used earlier A little bit disenchanted. And so I just. Very similar to the networking thing, I kind of got over the awkward feeling about it enough because I felt like there was some messaging that needed to go out there to sort of almost get people thinking about they could actually do something different with their lives and other people out there doing these things. And yes, sometimes they're being judged harshly and I'm not everybody's flavor, but that's okay.

I just did a physical breathing out like sigh of relief when you talked about showing up as yourself on LinkedIn. Because I think that idea of performing or behaving in a certain way or I sometimes talk about putting on the coat of leadership is something a lot of people who are non traditional leaders struggle with. And I think part of the journey of that you and I have both been through, the reinvention, the leaving corporate, the acting according to our values and with purpose is about getting in touch with yourself again and then having the courage to show up as yourself.

Yeah, absolutely. And to really know that like. And I wouldn't ever rule out going back into corporate for the right role or anything else. Freedom, I would say it's up there on my values, but it's not my number one value. So I would never rule it out, but I would go back in a much clearer version of myself than I am now. And as an acquired taste, they would certainly know what they were getting. Right. Because it's all out there. But I actually found when I had the coach and I was doing the leadership development program, that was probably also around the time that I switched into being far more authentic at work because before I had very much separated, there was professional is and then there was personal is. And the amount of energy you leak managing those two things and the amount of followership you forego if you present that front that you were talking about. People know, they don't, they don't necessarily name it, but they know it's not fully you and they don't necessarily fully trust you. Whereas if you come in fully as yourself, that's when real leadership opportunities come through because people choose to follow you. And you can't be a leader without followership.

So yeah, that's a very, very clear way of describing it. And one of my interviewees, and we need new leaders, said the same. She said she's now in her 50s and work her and home her. There's a much bigger Venn diagram between the two. And it just, it just means that work is fun because she's not performing or Putting on, putting on a show. She's 100% herself, so she enjoys work almost as much as she enjoys not being at work. And I find that very refreshing.

Yeah, that's a great story.

So, Liz, one of my big priorities, both with the book and the podcast, is we have this old leadership archetype in our heads. It is, goes back to our neuroscience. We recognize it as loud as room owning, as extrovert, maybe in a navy suit with a red tie. It's an old, old archetype, and my mission is changing it. How do we change that? So my question to you is, what can we do, both collectively and individually, to shift that for ourselves but for others around us?

I think identifying it and recognizing it when it first happens and when it constrains our own behavior and the way that we think about ourselves would be the first step. So I think actually identifying it, calling it, and not letting it change the way we see ourselves is a start. And then also how we see other people. So if we're looking at, well, who do we follow? Who do we listen to if we're hiring for a role, what filters are we already applying without realizing it subconsciously to that role? How can we think differently? And again, I mean, I suppose back to the example of using AI, like, can we even challenge our thinking or our assumptions, using a very safe space and a tool to do that, and then just embodying. And this is what I would really encourage everyone to do, is just embody who you really are in every scenario. So I understand that we have to filter ourselves a little for different contexts. That's understandable. But backing yourself that little bit and then looking back and realizing that was okay. That's the way we build a sense of self efficacy. And the more we do that, the more we can put ourselves out there. But I do think, and I say this as someone who is introvert but has learned to be ambivert for the roles that I've done. Because you absolutely have to for some of those roles. Right. If you're standing up in front of 200 people, you can't just hide behind the podium. If you want to have impact, you will need to flex a little bit, but stay true to yourself at the core.

And that's why the values work is so important, to know what your values are and where your boundaries lie.

Yeah. And to understand what you're standing for. I think we can do most things if we have a reason to do it. And that's why quite a lot of people get lost because they realize that they've been climbing this corporate ladder, but it's against the wrong wall. They're fighting for something that they don't believe in. And so I think if you know what you're standing for and particularly if you're from a diverse background, and that's a troublesome concept as it is now because that implies that it's disadvantaged. And I think that actually these days, hopefully we are getting to a stage where it's less disadvantaged. But it's not just you that you are standing for anymore.

Yeah. And that takes us so neatly back to what we were talking about at the beginning, about burnout, which comes because you don't know what you're standing for. And so you're just climbing. And eventually the climbing becomes unsustainable and dissatisfying. So that's a very tidy. A tidy return to the beginning of the podcast. So now, Liz, we get to the three questions I always ask. Give us a book recommendation.

This one really for me is so easy. 4000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman. And I think that's because. And it's tied to the burnout thing, but he focuses really on we're sold this ideal of we can be super, super productive, we can achieve everything. Accepting that on average we have just over 4,000 weeks to live on earth. And if you ever map that out on a piece of paper, it's remarkably grounding. Just accepting that we have to let go of some of that stuff and focus on what really matters to us can be extremely liberating. So I love that book. I recomm it to all my clients. I read it once a year. I just find it very centering.

Yeah, I know of the concept and I've heard of the book, but it's definitely time that I, that I actually read it. We need new leaders. I interviewed established leaders, but emerging leaders. And my passion and my mission really is to help those emerging leaders from diverse backgrounds, diverse identities, underrepresented minorities who coming into the workplace and are struggling with the constructs that already exist but have an ambition to lead. What three tips would you have for them?

So the first one I wish I'd listened to more and I was given it repeatedly when I was coming up in the world. So I had no excuse but was network. I think network ruthlessly networking is vital. And by network I mean building genuine relationship, not transactional icky network I mean Florida finding ways to add value, finding ways to be part of community. And that's very tied into well, being as well. But building that out because you never know down the line what that's going to lead to. A bigger network and a bigger kind of personal brand just hugely increases your surface area of luck or certainly opportunity when it comes to leadership opportunities. The second is possibly slightly more tactical, but I do think it's hugely underrated and that's communication. So learning communication skills, whether that be being able to stand up and talk, or perhaps more importantly being able to have interpersonal communications, manage your emotions, influence, but also really actively listen, I think is fundamental. Then the final one, I would say is actually more around the skills of resilience. We're going into the largest era of change that any of us has ever known and it's only going to get faster and faster. And I genuinely believe that the future of work will look very, very different in five years. So leading in that, you really need to have adaptability and you really need to have resilience, but we also need to be taking care of ourselves while we do it. So for me it would be around resilience.

Those are three beautiful tips and I'm going to repeat them back. So the one is network and build a community so that you can increase your surface area of luck. The next is build those really important communication skills because you're going to need them in corporate. And the third is resilience because we're all facing change, we don't know what's around the corner and resilience is a key skill. So, Liz, my last question. We live in tough times. You've alluded to that. Life isn't always easy. What brings you joy?

It's such a cop out. But my dog, my dog brings me so much joy. I've flown her from Hong Kong to the uk, which I think she's just about forgiving me for. But yeah, just being present and you can't not be present. So she enforces routine. We have to go out multiple times a day. Exercise is never negotiable in the morning because she needs it. And yeah, just, I sometimes think we just all need to be a bit more dog and a bit more in the moment and a bit more just overjoyed at the little things in life.

Oh, what a lovely answer. Liz Bradford, thank you for joining me on Speech Bubbles.

You've been listening to another production from Solid Gold Podcasts.