I'm Georgia Wolfe-Samuels - your Auditor, CPA, and Jamaican colleague turned Career Burnout Strategist. Yes, you read that right. The woman who spent years auditing financial statements and making sure everything balanced, contributing to quality frameworks, building and leading in the firm’s SQM monitoring function, helping shape the quality management framework that supports control owners across the U.S. and throughout our member firms in the Americas… decided the most important thing she could audit was her own life.

Turns out, the numbers were telling a story I could no longer ignore.

I gave corporate everything I had... and I mean everything. Full scope. No limitations. Late nights, early mornings, cross-border collaboration, leading teams, and doing work I'm genuinely proud of. But somewhere between the deadlines and the deliverables, I learned something they don't teach you in college: you can be excellent at your job and still be running on empty. You can be the most qualified person in the room and still feel invisible. And you can love what you do while quietly losing yourself in it.

I know because I lived it.

I had built a life that looked successful from the outside but had serious going concern issues on the inside. I was leaking power, and not in ways anyone could see on a balance sheet, a profit & loss statement, or a cash flow statement. I was leaking it in what I now refer to as our three primary career power buckets: Alignment, Authenticity, and Advocacy.

You see, I was often the only in the room. The only woman. The only minority. The only immigrant. And sometimes a confluence of all three -- navigating arenas that often triggered both imposter syndrome and intruder syndrome, and where where micro-aggressions were often an uninvited but familiar guest. As a result, I had learned to make myself smaller, work harder, and stay quieter than I ever should have, all in an effort to survive. And then my body started sending signals my ambition kept overriding... until it couldn't anymore, and in 2018 I ended up on the floor of my master bathroom fighting for my life.

And trust me, this was no de minimis finding. This was a material misstatement.

(Shameless plug: I chronicled the whole journey in my book, Redefining Her.)