What happens when the wellness coach burns out? Lisa Shubin knows.
She built a career helping people inside corporate and healthcare systems take care of themselves, then had to figure out how to take her own advice. In this episode, we talk about the gap between how organizations talk about wellness and how work actually gets done, the signals your body sends before a breakdown, and how her Ignite framework helps people build sustainable recovery rooted in values instead of hustle.
I’ve been looking forward to this one because Lisa is someone I’ve had the chance to work with through coaching, and her perspective on burnout is shaped by real experience on both sides. This one’s full of honest, practical wisdom.
Your body has been keeping score long before you had the vocabulary to describe what was happening. The tension in your shoulders after a meeting where nothing technically went wrong. The exhaustion at the end of a workday spent sitting. The breath you didn’t realize you were holding until someone pointed it out.
Burnout shows up in the body first. And most people don’t take it seriously until the body forces the conversation.
In this episode, I sit down with Lisa Shubin, a national board certified health and wellness coach with a background in kinesiology and over a decade of experience designing wellbeing strategies inside healthcare and corporate systems. Lisa has lived on both sides of this work. She’s supported others through burnout while navigating her own inside the same demanding systems. That experience led her to found Priority Self and develop the Ignite framework, a values-based approach to building sustainable wellbeing from the ground up.
What people still underestimate about burnout
Lisa started her career in cardiac rehab as an exercise physiologist, working with high-achieving business leaders recovering from heart surgery.
Back then, burnout didn’t have a name. It looked like stress, and the people pushing through it were doing so from a good place. They cared about the work. That’s what made it dangerous.
We talk about why the amount of support it actually takes to move through burnout catches most people off guard, and why trying to do it alone is a strategy that almost never works.
The gap between what organizations say about wellness and what actually happens
Lisa has spent 13 years in worksite wellness and has seen the full spectrum, from organizations that bake wellbeing into their business strategy to ones that treat it like a line item on a benefits sheet.
The contradiction she sees most often: companies talk about wellbeing but never make it behavioral. A wellness program that employees don’t use isn’t a wellness program. It’s a press release.
We dig into what it actually looks like when wellbeing is embedded in culture versus bolted on as an afterthought.
Why fixing the job without fixing the person doesn’t work
Lisa talks about hearing my podcast and being stopped by a question she’d never asked herself:
Can you heal where you are?
That question cracked something open for her.
We get into why people get stuck when they don’t have the vocabulary for what they’re experiencing, and why swapping jobs without doing the internal work usually means repeating the same patterns in a different office. Wherever you go, there you are.
The body signals you should take seriously before your body forces the issue
Blood pressure. Held breath during meetings. Shoulder tension. Physical exhaustion after a day of sitting. Lisa walks through the early warning signs most people dismiss, and the one that finally got her attention: her husband telling her she wasn’t herself.
We both share our own versions of this moment. For me, it was irritability, increasing migraines, and what I call the spontaneous combustion of tears.
Your body is giving you data. The question is whether you’re paying attention.
The Ignite framework: building a foundation before setting goals
Most people skip straight to the goal. Lisa built the Ignite framework after thousands of hours of coaching because she kept seeing the same pattern: someone sets a health or career goal, jumps straight into action, and flames out because the foundation was never there.
The framework has five phases:
- Wellness vision
- Core values alignment
- Prioritizing first steps
- Activating strengths
- Building a plan for setbacks.
It’s the work people skip, and it’s the work that makes everything else stick.
About Lisa Shubin
Lisa Shubin is a national board certified health and wellness coach, exercise physiologist, and the founder of Priority Self. With a background in kinesiology and over 13 years of experience designing wellbeing strategies inside healthcare and corporate systems, Lisa helps people build sustainable wellbeing rooted in their values, strengths, and self-knowledge. She developed the Ignite framework to give people the foundation most programs skip.
Connect with Lisa:
- Website: priorityself.com
- Instagram: @lisapriorityselfcoach
Resources mentioned
I’m Tara Kermiet — career coach, burnout strategist, and host of The Balanced Badass Podcast®. I help high-achievers and corporate leaders design careers that are successful and sustainable.
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