Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Kayla Sweet. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Kayla, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?
An early encounter with burnout was a defining moment in both my career and my life. It served as a wake-up call, signaling that my current way of living was unsustainable and that without significant change, a fulfilling and purposeful life would remain elusive.
To provide context, my childhood was shaped by the loss of my father to suicide when I was just four years old. Raised by our single mother amid financial struggles, I keenly understood the impact of mental health challenges on individuals and family dynamics from an early age. As the eldest daughter, I carried a profound sense of responsibility within my family, fueling my drive to comprehend human experiences and contribute to healing in the world.
With a background in Psychology and Fine Arts, I entered the professional world with a youthful idealism, ready to make a positive impact. Immediately after graduating, I embarked on a career in Community Mental Health as a Case Manager and Life Skills Coach for an Intensive Outpatient Addiction Recovery Program for Adolescents. The work was rewarding, but I burned out within six months.
The challenge wasn’t the difficulty of the tasks but rather the enormity and deeply rooted nature of the individual and societal issues I faced. Feeling that my efforts would never be enough, I intensified my commitment, working longer hours and tirelessly seeking tools and solutions. The weight of my clients’ pain affected me deeply, and my relentless pace without self-care eventually took its toll. I reached a breaking point, finding myself in tears on the way to work, overwhelmed by stress with no outlet for relief. Neglecting personal care and relationships, I lost myself rapidly.
Despite being inherently caring and empathetic, I’m also driven by achievement. Accustomed to academic success and tangible results from hard work, I struggled with the prolonged and uncertain nature of my new role. Recognizing the need for change, I left that position, dedicating time to personal reflection and healing before redirecting my career path entirely.
From that broken place emerged a desire for a more holistic approach to personal healing, leading me to Consciousness and Transformative Studies for my Master’s degree. Specializing in Consciousness and Healing and Transformational Leadership, I spent years providing mental health coaching and leading teams in the field. Witnessing the widespread prevalence of burnout across various professions, I delved into understanding its gender discrepancies and became passionate about preventing and recovering from burnout through stress management, self-care, and transformative self-love. I realized that for women especially, chronic stress and burnout could strike any of us at any time, and there were few safety nets to catch us. The world we live in doesn’t do a particularly good job of teaching women to care for themselves well and to remain deeply rooted in a strong sense of themselves. This leaves women at risk.
Today, I wear many hats, but my most cherished role is that of a Burnout Resilience Coach for women. Drawing on evidence-based tools and personalized coaching, I guide individuals beyond surface-level stress, exploring the thoughts and beliefs shaping their behaviors. This journey wouldn’t have been possible without my early experience with burnout, which propelled me towards a deeply meaningful pursuit addressing a crucial need in our world.
Kayla, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I help women transcend stress and burnout to create lives of joy, balance, and purpose through transformational coaching services. While I identify as a Burnout Resilience Coach for Women and a Life Coach specializing in self-care and stress management, these titles only scratch the surface of my work. I advocate for the power and potential within each person, emphasizing a strengths-based and holistic approach to service. Coaching is a collaborative, action-oriented, and present/future-focused endeavor. People’s pasts do have an impact, but my focus is on the now. What thoughts, beliefs, values, and actions guide people, and are they serving them? This is where I always start.
My coaching journey emerged after a personal experience with burnout early in my career, propelling me to explore transformative coaching during my Master’s in Consciousness and Transformative Studies. Professional training in mental health coaching and certifications in various methodologies, such as transformation life coaching, self-care coaching, and life purpose coaching, followed. I’ve synthesized these diverse approaches into a holistic method tailored to individuals’ needs.
I started my coaching business – Internally Guided Leadership – a little over a year ago because I wanted to take my education and personal experiences and use them to support women in breaking free of the chains of stress. I wanted to walk alongside them and empower them to create the lives they truly desired and deserved. Leadership is in the name of my business for a couple of reasons. The first is because I empower all women to step into self-leadership. The second is because I am passionate about empowering leaders to live and lead with balance and joy. Leadership plays a part even for people who don’t feel a sense of leadership in their lives or aren’t in formal leadership roles. We all can work on embracing the role of “leader” in our lives.
I help women recover from chronic stress and burnout and create lives they are in love with. I serve high-performing, goal-oriented women who know how to achieve things in their lives but struggle with balance and feel they have lost essential parts of themselves along the way. My role as a coach is to hold up a mirror for my clients to see where they have gaps in their lives that are causing stress and emotional pain. I ask the hard questions and create a safe space for women to embrace their wholeness. I never tell my clients what to do – they are the experts of their lives. I simply support them in uncovering their power and potential and bringing those forward into their lives in a balanced and sustainable way.
I work with women in various ways, including individual coaching packages, the Burnout to Balance program, and live events and workshops. Individual coaching packages come in all shapes and sizes based on the unique needs and budgets of the women seeking support. The Burnout to Balance program is a fully immersive experience. It is a 12-week transformational program with an online learning platform and 13 live coaching calls with me. This takes coaching one step further by giving women access to the information they need to transform key areas of their lives while providing a structure to follow as they navigate the road to balance. I also have free resources, including the Internally Guided Life podcast on Spotify and the micro-learning videos I post on social media under Internally Guided Coach.
What distinguishes me is my diverse background and unique approach, blending evidence-based tools with insights into consciousness and human transformation. Trained in mental health, psychology, transformative studies, and modern coaching, I offer versatile tools based on individual needs. My personal journey through chronic stress and burnout allows me to deeply empathize with clients’ pain and support them effectively from a place of true understanding.
I take profound pride in my work, viewing it as a precious gift and my personal contribution to the world’s healing. It fills me with pride because it serves as a catalyst for women to unearth their potential and manifest their dreams. My sincere wish is for every woman to embrace her intrinsic worth, tap into her power, and fully grasp her boundless potential.
I envision a world where every woman stands confidently, rooted in her complexities and wholeness, experiencing the exhilarating freedom and liberation life has to offer. I’m here not just as a coach but as a companion on the journey, walking alongside the strength, resilience, and intelligence that each of my clients brings to the table.
My mission is to witness them, to empower them, and to provide a sacred space where they can authentically be themselves and dream as big as their hearts desire. I firmly believe in the transformative power of women supporting one another and recognizing the unique stressors and conditioning we face. Through my work, I aspire to heal, empower, and foster a sense of community that stands resilient against those challenges. Together, we create a tapestry of strength, unity, and empowerment, breaking free from the constraints that society may impose.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I had to unlearn the idea that my worth resulted from how much or how hard I worked.
I came from a family with very little money and a lot of chaos growing up. There wasn’t much stability, and I wasn’t always sure of my worth or value. I learned, as many of us do, to get my sense of worth through my accomplishments at school. I was the student who did whatever it took to get an A. I received praise from teachers, classmates, and my mother when I did well in school. I felt proud of what I could accomplish using my intellect and hard work alone. This approach got me through grade school and undergraduate school – although a lot of anxiety accompanied it.
After I burned out, I had to evaluate my core beliefs and get to the root of my stress. Faced with a career and a world that was far more complex than our academic systems, I still strove to accomplish. I strove to prove my worth by how much I did, but I didn’t have the gratification of a good grade. I honestly didn’t even know if I was doing a good job. The only measure I had to assess my worth was to count the hours I was putting in and the effort I was exerting. I told myself what I was doing must be important because I gave all of myself to it. But my worth still came into question – if I wasn’t achieving or producing anything tangible, was I worthy?
It might seem obvious that the answer is yes; we have innate worth separate from what we do or produce. But I really didn’t know that in my mind or heart for a long time. My whole identity was wrapped around producing and achieving. When I couldn’t find a way to measure my success, I felt worthless. This was a big lesson I had to unlearn as I recovered from burnout.
I had to expand my identity to include all of me, not just what I did. I had to learn to love and care for myself regardless of the measurable outputs in my life.
If I hadn’t unlearned this lesson, I would still be in so much emotional and mental pain. I wouldn’t have had the courage to start a business or go for promotions because it would have crushed my sense of self-worth if they hadn’t worked out. I wouldn’t have been comfortable in situations of complexity and ambiguity. I wouldn’t have this strong sense of my identity that roots me into my life. As valuable as it was to unlearn the lesson that my work measured my worth, it took a lot of time and practice to rewrite this internal narrative.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
When I was in the middle of my undergraduate studies in psychology, I hit a really low point in my life, and my mental health was shaky. I was putting myself through school while working full-time, navigating relational challenges, and trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to do with my life. A dark cloud seemed to move over me, and I couldn’t see the light. I remember one night I was crying on my bathroom floor, questioning if all the struggle I had known for all of my life would ever pay off, would ever let up.
Even from the pits of darkness during that struggle, I felt a glimmer of hope. I had this nagging feeling from deep inside of me that healing wasn’t out of my reach, that happiness wasn’t a lie, that there was something in front of me that was better than the life I was living.
That glimmer of hope shook me. It shook my life up in the most beautiful of ways. I started making changes, one thing at a time. I learned to take care of my body and got into yoga. I learned to find some peace in my mind through meditation. I learned to let go and say goodbye to the people and circumstances that were adding to my pain. I learned to feel my feelings, even the ones that were horrible. I asked for help from a family member and was able to stay with them for a while so I could focus on my studies in a more healing environment. I breathed life back into myself, and my world started to change.
This was a year or two pre-burnout, which was its own kind of darkness, but this experience built up my reservoirs of hope and resilience. It taught me that no matter how hard things got, there was always light to be found. I have thought back to this night on the bathroom floor at many points in my life, and I remember that if I was able to pull myself through that – I could recover from anything. This is an important lesson for all of us because no matter how good life gets, there will be waves of darkness and challenge that wash over us repeatedly over the course of our lives. We have to learn to hold space for that heaviness and feel the emotions accompanying it while we also hold onto the hope and belief that the darkness will always subside. There will always be a new day, a breath of fresh air, a light at the end of the tunnel. We have the opportunity to embrace it all, the good and the bad, and I have.
That is ultimately what resilience is about, isn’t it? It’s about moving through our challenges and coming out the other side still whole. It’s about the strength required to feel our pain and our challenge while trusting it will pass. It’s about understanding the beauty of our human experience and being grateful to experience it all.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.internallyguidedleadership.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/internally_guided_coach/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/internallyguided
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayla-m-sweet/
- Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@internallyguidedcoach
Image Credits
Photographer: Jen Robison